£xhv<xvy  of  t:he  trheolo^icd  ^tminary 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 


PRESENTED  BY 

The  Estate  of  the 
Rev,  John  B.  Wiedinger 

BR  123  .A63  1912 
Andrews,  George  A.  1870- 
Efficient  religion 


1/ 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


GEORGE  ARTHUR  ANDREWS 


EFFICIENT  RELlfeaON 


'41 


BY 


GEORGE  ARTHUR  ANDREWS 

AUTHOB   OB"   "what   IS  ESSENTIAI." 


HODDER  &  STOUGHTON 

NEW  YORK 

GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


Copyright,  1912, 
By  GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


PREFACE 

The  temper  of  the  present  age  is  utilita- 
rian. Everybody  is  looking  for  results. 
The  question  of  utility  is  asked  shrewdly  by 
those  who  seek  profit,  sometimes  cynically 
by  those  who  indulge  excessively  in  pleas- 
ures, and  of  ttimes  desperately  by  those  who 
struggle  in  the  meshes  of  stressful  condi- 
tions. 

If  the  religion  of  Jesus  is  to  maintain 
and  increase  its  influence  with  the  practical 
men  and  women  of  this  century,  it  must 
do  more  than  to  demonstrate  its  truth,  more 
than  to  reveal  its  beauty,  more  even  than 
to  point  with  becoming  pride  to  its  twenty 
centuries  of  successful  history;  it  must  show 
its  present  helpfulness. 

"What  is  its  use?"     "What  is  it  good 

for?"     "What  can  it  do?"     These  are  the 

questions  which  men  and  women,  too,  are 

asking  to-day.     To  suggest  the  answer  to 

[5] 


PREFACE 


these  questions  is  the  object  of  this  Httle 
book.  No  effort  is  herein  made  to  add  to 
the  accumulating  mass  of  evidential  testi- 
mony to  the  helpfulness  of  Christ's  religion. 
The  aim  here  is  to  suggest  a  basis  in  reason 
for  the  acceptance  of  such  testimony. 

Our  task  is  partly  that  of  the  sifter.  We 
must  seek  to  winnow  the  grain  of  the  prac- 
tically beneficial  in  the  religion  of  Jesus 
from  the  chaif  of  those  beliefs  and  prac- 
tices which  are  pathetically  unhelpful.  But 
our  task  is  also  that  of  the  moulder,  and  of 
the  baker.  For  we  are  to  try  to  shape  the 
sifted  grain  into  one  homogeneous  whole 
and  to  present  it  in  a  form  that  may,  it  is 
hoped,  prove  wholesome  and  nutritious  to 
some  doubting,  careworn,  sinful  soul,  hun- 
gry for  the  "Bread  of  Life." 


[6] 


CONTENTS 


Chapteb. 

I  Profitable  Faith     . 

II  Practicable  Love     . 

III  Prevailing  Prayer  . 

IV  Saving  Forgiveness  . 
V  Abundant  Health    . 

VI  Sufficient  Consolation 

VII  Sustaining  Strength 

VIII  Satisfying  Joy  . 

IX  Attainable  Peace     . 

X  Achieving  Power 


Page. 
11 

27 

43 

57 

77 

93 

111 

127 

141 

159 


[7] 


PROFITABLE    FAITH 


CHAPTER       ONE 


"  If  a  brother  be  naked,  and  in  lack  of  daily  food,  and  one 
of  you  say  unto  him,  *Go  in  peace,  be  ye  warmed  and  filled ;' 
and  yet  ye  give  him  not  the  things  needful  to  the  body,  what 
doth  it  profit  ?     Can  faith  save  him  ?" — James  2  :  14-16. 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


PROFITABLE  FAITH 

When  Henry  Van  Dyke  wrote  his  true 
and  compelling  book,  "The  Gospel  for  an 
Age  of  Doubt,"  he  spoke  to  thinkers  of 
the  intellectual  appeal  of  the  religion  of 
Christ.  But  the  blackest  doubt  is  not  the 
fruit  of  thought ;  it  has  its  genesis  in  phys- 
ical conditions  and  in  moral  conditions. 

To-day  the  great  multitudes  of  those 
who  feel  no  concern  for  the  religion  of 
Jesus  are  people  who  never  think  very 
deeply  upon  any  subject.  They  are  those 
who  are  altogether  unfamiliar  with  the 
written  philosophies  of  men,  some  of  them 
even  unfamiliar  with  the  deeper  truths  of 
the  wintten  revelation  of  God's  Word. 
They  are  not  so  much  thinkers  as  doers. 
They  are  not  students,  but  actors. 

The  parts   which  most   of  these   actors 

[11] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


must  play  upon  the  stage  of  life  are  very 
limited.  Their  relations  to  the  other  actors 
on  the  stage  they  do  not  very  clearly  un- 
derstand, and  their  relation  to  the  Author 
of  the  play  is  wholly  uncomprehended.  In- 
deed, they  cannot  be  sure  that  the  play  has 
any  Author  at  all.  To  these  who  see  the 
stage  only  from  behind  the  scenes  all  is  lit- 
ter and  confusion.  They  stumble  through 
their  minor  parts  when  by  necessity  they 
must,  but  they  do  not  know  what  it  is  all 
about;  perhaps,  indeed,  the  most  of  them 
never  even  question  what  it  is  about. 

Here  is  the  dumb,  unspoken  unbelief, 
created  not  by  intellectual  questioning,  but 
by  untoward  circumstances.  It  is  the  un- 
belief not  of  the  profound  scholar,  but  of 
the  uncomprehending  child.  Yet  this  stolid, 
unthinking  unbelief  presents  the  most  se- 
rious of  all  obstacles  to  the  advancement  of 
true  Christian  faith. 

When  a  child  has  reached  for  the  tooth- 
some sweetmeat  and  has  found  his  hand  re- 
strained, he  is  in  no  mood  to  be  convinced 
by  argument  that  his  father  is  good.    When 
[12] 


PROFITABLE   FAITH 


he  has  touched  the  bright  thing  that  looked 
so  pretty,  and  has  been  burned  thereby, 
one  cannot  reasonably  expect,  while  his 
body  suffers,  that  his  mind  will  readily  com- 
prehend the  truth  of  love. 

Just  so  when  men  in  our  present  indus- 
trial system  toil  and  sweat  for  a  competence 
and  find  their  hands  held  back,  one  cannot 
expect  them,  in  the  misery  of  their  poverty, 
to  believe  very  strongly  in  a  God  who  loves 
them.  And  when  other  men  have  touched 
some  sinful  thing  that  seemed  attractive,  the 
immediate  effect  of  their  consequent  suffer- 
ing will  not  likely  be  a  resplendent  faith  in 
a  merciful  Providence. 

They  do  not  think  the  unbelief.  They  feel 
it.  It  has  become  a  part  of  their  experience. 
They  have  become  habituated  to  it.  Ex- 
actly as  they  become  accustomed  to  the  in- 
difference of  the  prosperous  classes  and  of 
the  moral  classes,  and  to  the  stringent  com- 
petition of  the  members  of  their  own  class, 
so  they  become  accustomed  to  expect  no  help 
from  any  divine  power,  no  help  and  no 
mercy. 

[13] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


This  is  only  a  partial  view  of  the  present 
day's  practical  unbelief.  By  the  side  of  the 
many  toiling,  suffering,  sinful  people  who 
experience  an  unbelief  in  God  which  they 
never  express,  we  must  place  all  those  who, 
in  prosperity,  flippantly  ignore  God;  and 
with  both  classes,  if  we  would  view  the  sit- 
uation in  its  entirety,  we  must  include  the 
multitudes  of  those  who  are  neither  at  the 
top  nor  at  the  bottom  of  the  industrial  scale, 
but  who  are  necessarily  busy  with  the  affairs 
of  the  earth,  and  who  must,  or  at  least  do, 
concentrate  all  their  powers  of  effort  in  the 
struggle  for  material  things.  Finally,  we 
must  include  in  this  great  company  of  un- 
thinking mibelievers  the  thousands  of  men 
and  women  of  all  classes  and  conditions 
Vvhose  lives  are  one  continuous  cry  of  bodily 
anguish,  of  soul  loneliness,  or,  worse  still, 
one  unbroken  stupor  of  sensuous  indulgence. 

Are  all  these  people  indifferent  to  Christ's 
religion  because  they  have  been  reading 
Thomas  Paine  or  Robert  Ingersoll?  Is  it 
because  they  have  discerned  certain  illogical 
conclusions  in  the  prevailing  systems  of 
[14] 


PROFITABLE   FAITH 


Christian  thought?  Have  they  become  es- 
tranged from  rehgion  because  of  the  hard 
fought  but  now  dead  issue  between  rehgion 
and  science?  None  of  these  reasons  ex- 
plains their  indifference.  It  is  appalhng  to 
think  how  many  men  and  women  there  are 
in  this  world  of  God's  who  do  not  vitally 
believe  in  Him,  not  because  they  have 
thought  themselves  away  from  Him,  but  be- 
cause they  have  never  felt  themselves  in 
Him. 

And  the  Church  for  centuries  has  been 
offering  to  these  a  system  of  thought,  bid- 
ding them  in  the  name  of  Saint  Augustine 
or  some  other  saint  to  believe  something,  in- 
stead of  telling  them  in  the  name  of  the 
Master  to  receive  something  and  to  do  some- 
thing. 

If  Christian  faith  be  only  or  principally 
a  system  of  thought,  it  can  never  become 
efficient  in  the  lives  of  these  who  cannot 
think,  or  do  not  think,  or  will  not  think. 
This  is  a  proposition  which  seems  self-evi- 
dent. To  present  to  these  unthinldng  toilers 
and  idlers,  strugglers  and  sufferers,  any 
[15] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


theological  view  of  the  atonement,  is  to  offer 
them  stones  for  bread.  The  attempt  to 
demonstrate  to  them  the  love  of  God  by  a 
process  of  syllogistic  reasoning  is  like  the 
attempt  to  demonstrate  a  problem  in  the  dif- 
ferential calculus  to  the  child  who  can  add 
two  and  two  only  by  the  aid  of  his  fingers, 
or  to  the  man  who,  in  the  stringency  of  his 
struggle  for  existence,  or  in  the  debauchery 
of  his  self-indulgence  has  long  ago  forgot- 
ten all  the  higher  mathematics  which  he  ever 
learned. 

Herein  is  suggested  the  cause  of  the  par- 
tial failure  of  the  Church  of  Christ  to  win 
and  to  hold  the  great  majority  of  the  breth- 
ren of  Christ.  The  Church  has  been  prone 
to  make  the  acceptance  of  Christ's  religion 
dependent  upon  thought.  It  therefore  has 
been  powerless  to  promote  the  true  Chris- 
tian faith  in  the  lives  both  of  those  who  in 
the  exigencies  of  their  material  conditions 
cannot  think,  and  of  those  who  in  the  ab- 
sorption of  their  pursuit  of  material  things 
do  not  think. 

There  are  encouraging  signs,  however, 
[16] 


PROFITABLE  FAITH 


that  the  Church  is  beginning  to  rectify  its 
mistake.  One  of  the  most  encouraging  of 
these  signs  is  the  modern  interest  of  the 
Church  in  men.  The  "Men  and  Religion" 
movement  of  this  present  day,  with  its  em- 
phasis upon  practical  Christianity,  must  be 
considered  as  an  attempt  to  rescue  the  re- 
ligion of  Jesus  from  the  realm  of  intellectual 
thought,  and  to  bring  it  into  the  realm  of 
efficient  action. 

The  definition  of  Christian  faith  towards 
which  the  Church  of  to-day  most  happily  is 
tending  is  just  this.  Christian  faith  is 
simply  the  faith  which  inspired  the  life- 
work  of  Christ.  It  is  the  consciousness  of 
filial  relationship  with  God,  the  conscious- 
ness, therefore,  of  help  from  God  and  of 
duty  towards  God. 

This  consciousness  may  be  only  experi- 
enced. There  may  be  those  who  cannot  ex- 
press it  in  words,  those  even  who  may  not 
intelligently  apprehend  the  thing  which  they 
feel.  The  child  does  not  need  to  apprehend 
clearly  the  idea  of  motherhood  in  order  to 
be  conscious  of  filial  relationship  with  his 

[17] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


mother.  He  may  not  know  enough  even  to 
understand  that  the  woman  who  succours 
him  and  who  cares  for  him  is  his  mother. 
Surely  there  will  always  be  depths  in  her 
maternal  love  which  his  intellect  can  never 
fathom.  But  when  the  child  goes  to  his 
mother  for  needed  nourishment  and  comfort, 
and  when  a  little  later  he  goes  out  to  obey 
that  mother  in  loyalty  and  in  true  devotion, 
he  is  acting  upon  his  faith  in  her.  His  in- 
ability to  reduce  the  idea  of  motherhood  to 
an  intellectual  formula  in  no  way  affects 
either  the  reality  of  his  faith  in  her,  or  its 
efficiency  in  his  own  life. 

We  must  separate  the  concept  of  Chris- 
tian faith  from  all  attempted  theological 
definitions  and  intellectual  systems,  and  we 
must  make  it  something  as  simple  and  as 
efficient  as  the  little  child's  consciousness  of 
the  care  of  the  mother  who  loves  him  and 
whom,  therefore,  he  must  obey.  We  may  ad- 
mit that  the  intellectual  definitions  have  their 
value  to  some  people,  but  Ave  must  see 
clearly  that  if  the  religion  of  Jesus  is  to  be 
of  use  to  the  multitudes  who  need  it  most, 
[18] 


PROFITABLE  FAITH 


it  must  be  based  only  upon  the  child-like 
confidence  in  Him  who  nourishes  and  com- 
forts and  guides. 

This  faith,  unexpressed  in  words,  it  may 
be  inexpressible,  unformulated  and  unsyste- 
matized, is  the  faith  that  is  profitable.  It 
will  do  for  the  children  of  the  Heavenly 
Father  just  what  it  does  for  the  children 
of  earthly  parents,  it  will  send  them  to 
Him  who  they  know  will  nourish  and 
strengthen.  It  will,  therefore,  first  of  all, 
cause  them  to  grow.  In  His  nourishing 
care  it  will  bring  them  out  of  the  feebleness 
of  immaturity  into  the  strength  of  manhood 
and  womanhood.  It  will  take  away  the 
hurt  of  the  pain,  and  the  sting  of  the  dis- 
appointment. It  will  make  their  lives  pur- 
poseful and  useful.  It  will  bring  them  into 
that  kind  of  a  life  which  Jesus  sometimes 
called  the  "Hfe  abundant"  and  sometimes 
the  "Hfe  eternal,"  the  life  of  vitality  and 
helpfulness,  the  hfe  whose  service  is  of  value 
now  and  whose  influence  never  ends. 

We  can  make  this  faith  profitable  to  the 
lives  of  others,  too.     We  can  bring  others 
[19] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


into  this  faith,  to  revert  to  our  parallelism, 
precisely  as  a  child  is  brought  into  the  con- 
sciousness of  his  human  parents'  nourishing, 
strengthening,  and  guiding  love.  We  can 
do  it  by  ministering  to  men's  present  needs. 
The  way  is  not  by  words,  but  by  deeds,  not 
so  much  by  instructions  and  sermons  as  by 
sympathy  and  helpfulness. 

This  was  Christ's  method  of  bringing  men 
into  profitable  faith  in  a  Father  of  love. 
He  fed  the  hungry.  He  healed  the  sick. 
He  comforted  the  sorrowful.  He  forgave 
the  sinful.  By  such  a  ministry  to  the  ex- 
isting needs  of  men.  He  revealed  to  them 
the  love  of  God.  He  was  not  content  to 
demonstrate  God's  love  to  those  who  were 
able  and  willing  to  think  about  it.  He  acted 
that  love  for  those  who  needed  to  experi- 
ence it. 

The  Church  must  insist  upon  Christ's 
method  of  promoting  faith  if  it  would  make 
that  faith  profitable.  Faith  in  God  can  be 
made  an  efficient  force  in  the  lives  of  the 
unhappy  and  the  unsatisfied,  the  careless 
idler  and  the  absorbed  toiler,  the  discontented 
[20] 


PROFITABLE   FAITH 


struggler  for  wealth  and  the  disappointed 
struggler  for  pleasure,  only  in  this  one  way, 
by  the  Christian's  imitation  of  the  method  of 
the  Master. 

This  man  in  our  community,  this  neigh- 
bour of  ours,  this  brother  for  whom  Christ 
lived  and  died,  is  caught  and  held  fast  in  the 
grinding  wheels  of  our  industrial  machinery. 
He  can  do  only  a  certain  kind  of  labour,  but 
he  is  by  no  means  free  to  labour  where  he 
will.  He  is  in  bondage  on  the  one  hand  to 
the  organization  of  capital,  and  on  the  other 
to  the  organization  of  labour.  He  is,  as  it 
were,  caught  between  the  whirring  wheels 
of  the  increasing  needs  of  his  family  and  the 
increasing  cost  of  everything  that  his  family 
needs.  Now  the  labouring  man  is  not  es- 
tranged from  the  efficient  religion  of  Jesus 
Christ.  It  is  true  that  labour  organizations 
have  sometimes  expressed  their  antagonism 
to  the  Church  of  Christ.  But  the  ideal 
of  the  real  religion  of  Jesus  was  very  like 
the  ideal  for  which  these  labour  unions  are 
striving,  the  ideal  of  justice,  equity,  free- 
dom, and  brotherly  love. 
[21] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


Christian  faith  can  help  this  labouring 
man,  the  efficient  faith,  efficiently  imparted. 
It  is  only  that  empty  repetition  of  meaning- 
less words,  so  sarcastically  described  by  the 
author  of  the  Epistle  of  James,  that  has 
failed  to  help  him.  Any  man  who  will  give 
his  sympathetic  attention  to  the  stressful 
conditions  under  which  this  labouring  man 
must  live  and  toil,  any  Christian  who  will 
try  to  better  those  conditions,  will  help  this 
man  into  that  faith  in  God  which  will  profit 
him  both  in  this  world  and  in  the  world  which 
is  to  come.  Help  this  man  to  what  he 
knows  he  needs,  and  he  will  be  helped  to  the 
satisfaction  of  the  greater  need  which  now 
he  may  not  realize. 

All  about  us,  too,  are  the  sinners; 
the  brutalized,  ostracized,  flagrant  sinners. 
These  people  are  not  so  very  unlike  the  rest 
of  mankind,  except  that  they  are  unclothed 
by  social  customs  and  unwarmed  by  social 
sympathy.  It  is  because  of  the  nakedness 
of  their  souls  that  they  give  license  to  their 
lower  passions  and  appetites.  The  man  who 
indulges  in  gross  sins  is  probably  not  so  bad 
[22] 


PROFITABLE   FAITH 


in  God's  sight  as  the  man  who  deliberately 
plans  to  profit  from  that  indulgence.  Yet 
society,  and  sometimes  the  very  Church  of 
God,  has  shunned  the  man  who  sins  and  con- 
doned the  man  who  has  enticed  him  to  sin. 

Can  faith  save  both  of  these  men?  Yes, 
the  efficient  faith,  efficiently  induced.  So 
long  as  Christians  are  content  to  say  to  such 
in  mere  words, — "be  moral,"  "be  respect- 
able," "believe  in  Christ  and  get  converted," 
it  will  not  help  them  to  the  life  that  is  lived 
in  God.  But  when  Christians  become  ready 
to  try  to  clothe  their  nakedness  with  the 
warmth  of  their  sympathy  and  their  sacri- 
ficing ministry,  when  they  become  ready  to 
do  for  them  and  are  no  longer  content  to 
talk  at  them,  then  they  will  help  them. 

The  faith  of  professing  Christians  having 
become  profitable  in  their  own  lives  will  pro- 
duce the  profitable,  developing,  strengthen- 
ing faith  in  the  lives  of  others. 


[28] 


PRACTICABLE    LOVE 


CHAPTER       TWO 


"A  new  commandment  I  give  unto  you.  That  ye  love  one 
another;  as  I  have  loved  you,  that  ye  also  love  one  another." 
—John  13  :  34. 


PRACTICABLE  LOVE 

When  Jesus  was  teaching'  His  disciples 
at  Jerusalem,  the  government  of  Judea  was 
controlled  by  the  greed  of  an  unscrupulous 
imperialism,  and  the  religion  of  Judea  had 
become  the  hollow  form  of  a  heartless  and 
lifeless  submission  to  law.  By  a  systerri  of 
unjust  taxation  the  Roman  Governor  was 
robbing  the  people  of  their  possessions,  and 
by  the  pretense  of  religious  authority  the 
Jewish  Sanhedrin  was  depriving  them  of 
their  liberty.  No  wonder,  then,  that  Christ's 
commandment  to  love  one  another  was  char- 
acterized by  Him  as  new. 

But  the  particular  company  of  men  to 
w^hom  this  strange  command  was  spoken, 
though  living  in  an  age  of  political  and 
of  religious  selfishness,  had  for  nearly 
three  years  been  in  fellowship  with  the 
Man  of  Love.  In  His  presence  they 
had  caught  occasional  glimpses  of  a  re- 
[27] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


ligion  more  spiritual  than  the  hteral  legaKsm 
of  their  countrymen,  and  ghmpses  of  a  gov- 
ernment less  oppressive  than  that  of  their 
conquerors.  They  had  witnessed  their  Mas- 
ter's helpful  sympathy  for  the  sick  and  the 
unfortunate;  they  had  seen  His  tender  for- 
giveness of  the  sinful.  More  significant  still, 
they  had  felt  His  love  for  themselves,  and 
the  love  had  had  its  inevitable  effect  upon  the 
development  of  their  characters.  It  had 
changed  the  "sons  of  thunder"  into  teach- 
able and  lovable  disciples.  It  had  made  the 
doubting  Thomas  the  loyal  friend,  who  was 
ready  to  die  with  his  Master  in  an  apparently 
foolish  and  forlorn  cause.  It  had  sur- 
charged the  heart  of  the  impetuous  Peter  so 
that  he  could  confidently  declare  himself  the 
unfailing  champion,  vowing  that  though  he 
should  stand  alone,  he  would  yet  stand 
boldly  by  his  Master's  side  to  the  very 
death. 

Yet  it  must  be  remembered  that  there 

were  some  things  that  the  love  of  Jesus  had 

not  accomplished  for  these  men.       It  had 

made  them  neither  omniscient  nor  omnipo- 

[28] 


PRACTICABLE  LOVE 


tent.  It  had  not  taken  away  all  the  self- 
seeking  from  James  and  John,  nor  all  the 
doubt  from  Thomas,  nor  all  the  cowardice 
from  Peter.  The  disciples  were  still  just 
mortal  men  with  varying  characteristics  and 
many  human  weaknesses.  They  were  still 
slow  of  understanding  and  slow  of  heart. 

We  know  that  they  were  slow  of  under- 
standing because,  in  spite  of  their  fellowship 
with  the  Man  of  Love,  they  had  as  yet  no 
conception  of  His  religion  other  than  some 
slight  modification  of  the  worship  of  Je- 
hovah, through  obedience  to  Mosaic  law. 
We  know  it,  too,  because  they  had  as  yet  im- 
agined no  government  other  than  the  tem- 
poral government  of  Israel's  expected  Mes- 
siah and  Deliverer.  We  know  they  were 
slow  of  heart  because  they  were  still  selfish 
enough  to  desire  for  themselves  the  first 
places  of  honour  and  of  riches  in  the  new 
government  for  which  they  hoped;  because 
they  were  weak  enough  to  sleep  while  Jesus 
suffered  alone  in  Gethsemane,  and  because 
they  were  craven  enough  to  desert  Him 
when  He  was  taken  caj^tive  in  the  garden. 
[29] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


Evidently,  in  spite  of  the  years  of  associa- 
tion with  the  love  of  Jesus,  the  command- 
ment enjoining  their  own  love  was  some- 
what new  even  to  the  disciples. 

Is  it  still  a  new  commandment  in  the  twen- 
tieth century?  The  modern  republican 
form  of  government  has  not  removed  from 
men  all  opportunity  for  self-aggrandize- 
ment. Political  parties  now  struggle  for 
the  supremacy  which  once  by  inheritance  was 
enjoyed  by  emperors,  but  the  party  in  con- 
trol still  uses  its  power  for  its  own  ends. 
Under  the  pretense  of  government  the  op- 
pression of  the  poor  is  even  now  legalized, 
and  it  makes  little  difference  whether  that 
oppression  be  accomplished  by  unjust  tax- 
ation, or  by  the  tariff-protected,  money- 
bought  power  of  corporations.  Who  would 
dare  to  say  that  our  present  age  is  not  pro- 
ducing politicians  who  are  as  thoughtless  of 
the  rights  of  those  whom  they  govern  as 
was  the  cruel,  greedy,  and  cowardly  Roman 
Pilate? 

And  what  about  the  professed  religion  of 
this  twentieth  century?  What  about  the 
[30] 


PRACTICABLE  LOVE 


slowness  of  comprehension  and  the  slowness 
of  heart  of  those  who  have  behind  them, 
not  three  years  of  association  with  the  liv- 
ing Jesus,  it  is  true,  but  twenty  centuries  of 
the  history  of  the  operation  of  God's  love 
through  Christ  Jesus  our  Lord?  Have  the 
minds  of  these  modern  discij^les  completely 
grasped  the  truth  that  Christ's  Kingdom  is 
not  the  kingdom  of  the  worldly  prosperity, 
say  of  some  Church?  Have  these  no  desire 
for  the  chief  places  of  temporal  power  and 
of  influence?  Are  not  some  of  them  still 
sleeping  soundly  while  their  brethren  and 
Christ's  brethren  in  agony  sweat  blood?  Are 
all  these  free  from  the  just  charge  of  the 
desertion  of  Christ's  cause  when  it  has 
become  unpopular,  and  of  the  denial  of 
Christ's  cause  w^hen  its  confession  has  en- 
tailed inconvenience  and  imagined  danger? 
Our  religion  can  no  longer  be  considered 
as  a  mere  matter  of  punctilious  obedience 
to  ceremonial  law.  We  have  reached  the 
time  when  it  has  become  the  proper  and 
conventional  thing  for  religious  people  to 
express  their  love  for  God  and  for  Christ. 
[31] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


But  just  to  love  God  and  to  adore  Christ 
for  His  sacrifice  is  not  precisely  the  import 
of  Christ's  new  commandment.  He  said 
men  were  to  love  their  fellows.  Must  this 
commandment  still  be  denominated  as  some- 
thing new  and  strange?  Indeed,  so  new  is 
this  commandment  because  so  very  imper- 
fectly has  it  been  obeyed  that  many  men  to- 
day are  declaring  that  it  cannot  be  obeyed. 
Twenty  centuries  of  the  practice  of  perfect 
obedience  to  that  command  would  have 
brought  the  entire  world  to  complete  recog- 
nition of  its  practicability.  But  twenty  cen- 
turies of  slowness  of  comprehension  and  of 
slowness  of  heart  have  brought  us,  God  save 
the  mark,  only  to  the  place  where  thought- 
ful men  are  questioning  the  commandment's 
practical  utility. 

We  must  ask,  then,  another  question.  Is 
the  commandment,  which  is  still  new,  im- 
practicable in  this  twentieth  century  of  ap- 
parent selfishness?  Before  we  hastily  an- 
swer this  question  in  the  affirmative,  however, 
we  must  be  sure  that  we  understand  what 
we  mean  by  the  term  "love,"  and  we  must 
[32] 


PRACTICABLE   LOVE 


be  equally  sure  that  we  are  looking  in  the 
right  direction  for  the  expected  results  from 
the  practice  of  love. 

If  Christian  love  were  only  an  emotion 
of  affection,  the  commandment's  universal 
application  w^ould  indeed  be  an  impossibil- 
ity.    Affection  cannot  be  practiced  by  all 
men  with  reference  to  all  other  men.     Men 
of  antipathetic  temperaments  cannot  have 
an  affection  for  each  other  any  more  than 
an  acid  can  have  an  affinity  for  an  alkali. 
If    Christ's    commandment,    to    "love    one 
another,"  means  that  we  are  to  desire  in- 
timate, lover-like  relations  with  all  men,  if 
it  means  that  we  are  actually  to  long  for 
the  companionship  of  the  dirty  and  the  de- 
graded, the  diseased  and  the  sinful,  then, 
frankly,  the  command  is  impossible  of  ful- 
filhnent.     Human  affection  is  the  natural 
product  of  human  affinities.     And  afi^nity, 
a  term  which  unfortunately  is   sometimes 
loosely  used,  the  real  affinity  of  human  souls 
is  something  created  by  God.  It  is  not  some- 
thing that  can  be  commanded  even  by  God's 
Son.   Even  Jesus  Himself  seems  naturally 
[33] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


and  inevitably  to  have  had  warmer  affec- 
tion for  some  people  than  for  others.  He 
seems  to  have  preferred  the  society  of  John 
to  that  of  Judas.  He  loved  JVIary  and 
Martha  of  the  little  home  in  Bethany  with 
a  satisfying  affection  that  He  could  not  pos- 
sibly have  felt  for  the  scribes  and  the  Phari- 
sees and  for  the  publicans  and  sinners. 

We  are  forced  to  conclude,  then,  that  the 
love  commanded  by  Jesus  is  not  an  emotion 
of  affection,  but  only  and  always  a  principle 
of  action.  Let  us  make  the  definition  com- 
plete and  specific.  Christian  love  is  the 
principle  of  benevolent  action.  When  a 
man  has  acknowledged  to  himself  a  desire 
to  help  others  and  has  converted  that  desire 
into  a  motive  of  service,  he  has  accepted  into 
his  life  the  love  which  is  the  very  dynamic 
of  the  Christian  religion. 

We  must  seek  the  fruit  of  such  love  not 
in  a  man's  feelings,  but  in  his  deeds. 
Though  he  may  not  naturally  care  to  asso- 
ciate with  the  dirty  and  the  degraded,  does 
he  try  to  cleanse  and  to  elevate  them?  If 
he  tries  to  help  them  he  is  obeying  Christ's 
[34] 


PRACTICABLE  LOVE 


commandment  of  love.  If  he  is  content  to 
leave  them  alone  in  their  unfortunate  con- 
ditions, he  is  not  obeying  the  commandment. 
The  test  of  the  practice  of  Christian  love  is 
just  as  simple  as  this. 

It  must  be  observed,  too,  that  there  are 
limitations  to  the  effect  of  such  love  upon 
him  who  really  possesses  it  and  practices  it. 
The  possession  and  practice  of  Christian 
love  will  not  make  one  omniscient  and  om- 
nipotent. It  will  not  destroy  one's  individ- 
uality, nor  will  it  mould  all  men  according 
to  one  fashion.  The  impetuosity  of  the 
Peters  will  still  persist.  The  questioning 
minds  of  the  Thomases  will  still  ask, 
"Why?"  and  "How?"  It  may  be  that  some- 
thing of  the  desire  for  personal  preferment 
may  remain  in  the  hearts  of  the  sons  of 
Zebedee. 

This  limitation,  both  of  the  nature  and 
of  the  fruits  of  love,  indicates  that  the  pos- 
session of  Christian  love  is  not  incompatible 
with  the  possession  of  a  sturdy  selfhood.  A 
Christ-like  interest  in  the  betterment  of  one's 
fellows  is  by  no  means  the  contradiction  of 
[35] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


a  natural,  God-commanded  interest  in  one's 
own  betterment.  The  former  interest  is  not 
the  contradiction  of  the  latter,  but  its  supple- 
ment. To  seek  for  one's  self  is  the  demand 
of  a  law  of  human  life.  To  seek  for  others 
is  the  added  demand  of  a  higher  law  of 
human  life.  The  equable  adjustment  of 
these  two  God-given  commands  is  alike  the 
problem  of  the  indvidual's  life  and  the  prob- 
lem of  the  industrial  and  political  life  of 
nations. 

Right  here  a  ray  of  hope  penetrates  the 
dark  picture  of  the  world's  selfishness.  The 
apparent  undue  prevalence  of  self-seeking 
does  not  force  us  to  admit  that  men  cannot 
be  actuated  by  love,  nor  even  that  they  are 
not  in  some  measure  already  actuated  by 
love.  The  glaring  selfishness  is  observable 
for  the  most  part  only  because  so  many  men 
have  not  learned  how  to  adjust  their  clam- 
ouring love  impulses  to  their  insistent 
self-seeking  impulses.  Men  are  not  in  gen- 
eral indifferent  to  their  neighbours'  welfare, 
but  by  the  exigencies  of  modern  conditions 
they  are  forced  to  give  themselves  with  ap- 
[36] 


I^IIACTICABLE   LOVE 


parent  forgetfulness  of  others  to  the  ad- 
vancement of  then'  own  welfare. 

How  to  add  the  command  of  Christ  de- 
manding love  for  others  to  the  command  of 
Xature  demanding  self -protection  and  self- 
advancement,  that  is  the  problem  which  must 
be  solved  by  those  who  would  make  the  re- 
ligion of  Jesus  of  real  value  to  the  toiling, 
struggling,  competing  men  of  this  busy 
twentieth  century.  It  is  a  problem  in  addi- 
tion, and  not  in  subtraction.  It  is  not  how 
to  make  men  think  less  of  themselves,  but 
how  to  make  them  think  more  of  others.  As 
the  Golden  Rule  by  implication  expresses  it, 
men  are  to  be  taught  to  treat  others  not 
better  than  they  treat  themselves,  but  as  well. 
*'Do  unto  others  as  ye  would  that  men 
should  do  unto  you."  This  "golden  rule" 
commandment  of  Jesus  is  exactly  synony- 
mous with  His  "love"  commandment.  To 
love  one  another,  that  is,  to  desire  to  help  one 
another,  in  its  operation  is  just  that  treat- 
ment of  others  which  squares  with  the  Gol- 
den Rule. 

When  we  thus  understand  the  meaning 

[37] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


and  the  expected  results  of  Christian  love,  let 
us  not  at  all  be  discouraged  by  the  evidence 
of  the  selfishness  and  greed  that  surrounds 
us.  For  in  spite  of  the  apparent  selfishness, 
in  spite  of  much  real  selfishness,  there  was 
never  a  time  before  this  twentieth  century 
when  men  were  so  generally  engaged  in 
obeying  this  new  commandment  of  Christ. 
In  answer  to  him  who  declares  Christian 
love  to  be  impracticable,  show  him  the  hos- 
pitals and  endowed  schools,  the  public  li- 
braries and  the  social  settlements,  the  houses 
of  refuge  and  reform.  Tell  this  man  of  the 
renowned  philanthropists  who,  it  is  true, 
have  become  great  in  self-seeking  industry 
and  powerful  in  the  selfish  accummulation 
of  wealth,  but  who  are  sharing  the  product 
of  their  greatness  and  their  power  with 
others.  Tell  him,  too,  of  the  multitudes  of 
the  unknown  philanthropists  who  are  also 
competing  with  their  fellows  for  their  own 
advancement,  but  who  nevertheless  are  shar- 
ing with  others  the  products  of  their 
smaller  achievements.  Remind  this  cynic 
that  men  are  working  for  themselves  because 
[38  ] 


PRACTICABLE   L0\^ 


they  must,  but  show  him  how,  at  the  same 
time,  they  are  working  for  others  because 
they  would.  Admit  that  men  are  slow  of 
understanding  and  slow  of  heart,  mortal 
men  all  of  them,  of  individual  peculiarities 
and  of  many  human  frailties.  But  make 
this  doubter  see  that  the  impulse  of  obedi- 
ence to  the  law  of  love  is  inherent  within 
them;  and  that  the  fruit  of  that  love  is 
not  lacking  in  their  lives,  so  long  as  they 
but  try  to  give  to  a  neighbour  in  need  even 
the  cup  of  cold  water  in  the  spirit  of  the 
serving  Christ. 

Christian  love  can  be  practiced  because 
it  is  being  practiced  every  day.  It  must  be 
practiced,  because  it  is  a  God-commanded 
law  of  life.  It  will  be  practiced  to  the  bene- 
fit of  all  of  God's  children  so  long  as  God  is 
God,  for  God  Himself  is  love. 

Here,  enwrapped  in  the  very  nature  of 
God,  is  the  promise  of  the  practical  efficiency 
of  every  act  of  love.  He  who  does  a  loving 
deed  for  his  neighbour  in  need,  accomplishes 
three  things.  He  lifts  himself  nearer  to 
the  Father  whose  child  he  is.  He  brings  re- 
[39] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


lief  and  happiness  to  his  brother  who  is  also 
God's  child.  And  he  helps  to  induce  in  his 
brother's  heart  the  consciousness  of  the  God 
who  cares. 

**  Who  gives  of  himself  with  his  alms  feeds  three, 
Himself,  his  hungering  neighbour,  and  Me." 


[40] 


PREVAILING   PRAYER 


CHAPTER     THREE 


"All  things,  whatsoever  ye  shall  ask  in  prayer,  believing, 
ye  shall  receive." — Matthew  21 :  22. 


PREVAILING  PRAYER 

A  Religion  without  prayer  is  an  anomaly. 
A  prayer  without  a  reasonable  assurance  of 
its  satisfying  answer  is  an  absurdity.  The 
religion  of  Jesus,  to  maintain  and  to  increase 
its  influence  among  men,  must  not  only  teach 
them  how  to  pray ;  it  must  give  to  them  the 
assurance  of  the  efficacy  of  their  prayers. 

There  are  current  in  these  modern  times 
two  objections  to  prayer,  whose  statements 
must  necessarily  be  in  philosophical  terms, 
but  whose  influence  is  felt  by  many  people 
who  have  never  even  heard  of  their  philoso- 
phy. The  objections  are  both  based  upon 
the  truth  of  the  immutable  laws  of  nature. 

The  first  objection  assumes  that  nature, 
in  its  immutability,  is  fatalistic.  What  is, 
must  be.  What  will  be,  cannot  be  avoided. 
By  the  operation  of  the  law  of  gravity,  when 
a  man  steps  out  of  the  top-story  window  of 
one  of  our  modern  skyscraping  buildings, 
he  will  fall  to  the  ground.  He  will  fall  just 
[43] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


the  same  whether  his  last  words  be  a  prayer 
or  a  curse.  By  the  operation  of  the  law  of 
the  "survival  of  the  fittest,"  the  strong  and 
the  industrious  will  succeed,  the  weak  and 
the  indolent  will  fail,  and  both  success  and 
failure  are  apparently  independent  of  men's 
petitions  to  God.  By  the  inevitableness  of 
disease  and  of  death  the  man  exposed  to 
contagion  is  liable  to  become  ill,  whether  he 
be  a  man  of  prayer  or  a  man  of  sin;  and 
when  his  time  comes  to  die,  each  man,  in 
spite  of  his  piteous  pleading,  must  go  out 
alone  upon  the  unknown  journey.  Since 
all  men  are  in  the  hands  of  relentless,  fatal- 
istic laws,  of  what  use  is  prayer? 

The  second  objection  based  upon  the  same 
truth  of  nature's  laws  assumes  the  benefi- 
cence of  nature  and  of  nature's  God.  His- 
tory has  demonstrated  that  seed-time  and 
harvest  shall  not  fail.  Experience  has 
proven  that  the  seed  planted  by  the  prayer- 
less  man  is  as  productive  as  that  planted  by 
him  who  consciously  communes  with  the 
Creator.  The  broken  bone  will  knit  whether 
the  bone  belongs  to  the  irreverent  sinner  or 
[44] 


PREVAILING  PRAYER 


to  the  praying  saint.  Besides,  we  have  it 
from  the  very  teaching  of  the  Bible  itself 
that  the  God  manifested  in  benevolent  na- 
ture is  the  God  of  mercy  and  of  love,  and 
that  He  is  no  respecter  of  persons.  "He 
maketh  His  sun  to  rise  on  the  evil  and  on 
the  good,  and  sendeth  rain  on  the  just  and 
on  the  unjust."  Since  God  will  do  for  men 
all  He  can  do  for  them  anyway,  why  should 
they  pray  to  Him? 

Of  this  latter  familiar  objection  there  is 
a  slight  modification  induced  by  a  most  beau- 
tiful religious  trust.  This  modification 
makes  prayer  to  God  not  only  unnecessary, 
but  really  unfilial.  What  human  father,  it 
is  argued,  who  really  loves  his  children,  needs 
to  be  asked  to  bestow  the  blessings  of  his 
love?  Is  not  the  very  petition  itself  a  sug- 
gestion that  the  child  doubts  the  parental 
care?  Why,  then,  should  a  trusting  child 
of  God  insult  his  Father's  love  by  petition? 
Those  who  call  themselves  Christians  can- 
not avoid  these  well-founded  objections  to 
prayer.  Nor  can  they  evade  the  objection 
by  the  sophistical  retort  that  prayer  in  its 
[45] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


essence  is  not  petitionary,  but  only  commun- 
ional.  To  tell  any  man  that  he  can  com- 
mune with  God,  but  that  he  cannot  or  should 
not  ask  God  for  the  things  which  he  needs 
and  wants,  makes  the  permitted  communion 
most  unreal  and  artificial.  If  the  term 
"communion  with  God"  has  any  vital  sig- 
nificance at  all,  it  must  include  the  unre- 
served outpouring  of  the  human  heart  into 
the  Heart  Divine.  Certainly  no  child  can 
properly  be  said  to  be  in  communion  with  his 
human  parent  if  the  child's  conversation 
with  his  parent  must  be  limited  to  the  dis- 
cussion of  the  generalities  of  faith  and  ado- 
ration and  love.  The  child  must  be  able  to 
tell  his  father  all  that  is  in  his  own  heart. 
He  must  be  free  to  name  his  specific  dis- 
tresses and  his  specific  desires,  and  the  com- 
munion is  not  complete  unless  the  child  can 
expect  from  his  father  specific  sympathy 
and  specific  help.  Leave  petitionary  prayer 
out  of  the  idea  of  communion  with  God 
and  we  have  no  real  communion  left. 

Here,  then,  is  our  dilemma.     On  the  one 
hand,  we  Christians  of  the  present  day  can- 
[46] 


PREVAILING  PRAYER 


not  deny  the  truth  of  the  changelessness  and 
the  beneficence  of  nature's  laws.  Our  en- 
tire lives  are  lived  in  bondage  to  those  laws. 
We  are  sustained,  developed,  and  matured 
by  their  blessings.  On  the  other  hand,  we 
Christians  must  assert  the  necessity  and  the 
efficacy  of  petitionary  prayer,  or  we  shall 
have  no  sure  foundation  for  the  fabric  of  our 
religion.  We  must  therefore  meet  these 
objectors  to  prayer  on  their  own  ground. 
The  challenge  which  they  have  laid  down  we 
must  accept.  If  we  are  to  make  the  religion 
of  Jesus  of  real  value  to  these  doubters  and 
to  multitudes  of  others  who,  perhaps,  have 
only  felt  the  doubt  which  they  have  never 
formulated,  we  must  show  the  profit  of 
prayer  not  in  spite  of  the  immutability  of 
law,  but  because  of  it. 

When  our  task  is  thus  clearly  stated,  we 
must  admit  at  once  that  certain  prevalent 
conceptions  of  prayer  are  both  untenable 
and  unhelpful.  Prayer  is  not  the  attempt 
of  the  finite  will  to  change  the  will  of  God. 
Perhaps  too  many  of  the  prayers  which  are 
offered,  both  in  public  and  in  private,  resem- 

[47] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


ble  the  petulant  teasing  of  wilful  and  selfish 
infants.  The  expectation  that  God  will  make 
us  His  special  favorites,  immune  from  sor- 
row and  sin  and  exempt  from  the  punish- 
ment of  sin,  simply  because  we  ask  Him  to 
do  so  is  as  foreign  to  the  true  conception  of 
prayer  as  the  selfishness  underlying  the  ex- 
pectation is  foreign  to  the  nature  of  God. 
No  effort  of  the  finite  will  can  change  the 
Infinite  will.  No  petition  of  man  can  ren- 
der null  and  void  the  operation  of  a  single 
one  of  God's  changeless  and  beneficent  laws. 
Again,  prayer  is  not  a  substitute  for  com- 
mon sense,  nor  for  purposeful  human  en- 
deavour. If  we  ask  God  for  things  which 
to  us  seem  reasonably  in  opposition  to  His 
will,  as  it  has  been  revealed  to  us  in  nature 
and  by  science  as  well  as  in  religion  and  by 
faith,  we  cannot  hope  for  such  prayer  to  be 
efficacious.  And  if  we  ask  God  to  do  for  us 
those  things  which  He  has  very  evidently 
intended  that  we  should  do  for  ourselves, 
we  shall  likewise  find  our  petitions  of  little 
avail.  Such  prayer  is  based  not  upon  the 
mutual  understanding  and  the  friendship 
[48] 


PREVAILING  PRAYER 


contained  in  the  idea  of  communion,  but 
upon  an  unsympathetic  and  unfriendly  mis- 
understanding which  makes  real  communion 
impossible. 

Prayer  is  always  the  communion  of  man 
with  God.  It  includes,  therefore,  that  kind 
of  petition  which  is  in  accord  with  man's 
understanding  of  God.  Its  results  can  be 
expected  only  in  that  kind  of  helpfulness 
which  is  in  accordance  with  God's  under- 
standing of  men.  The  ascending  petition 
is  human  in  its  scope,  and  may  therefore  be 
faulty,  both  in  matter  and  in  manner  of  ex- 
pression. The  resulting  answer  will  be  di- 
vine in  its  nature,  and  its  helpfulness  may 
therefore  be  in  terms  not  immediately  rec- 
ognizable by  the  human  petitioner.  Thus, 
when  it  is  said  that  God  sometimes  seems  to 
answer  men's  prayers  with  a  "No"  instead 
of  with  a  "Yes,"  the  truth  in  the  saying  is 
that  the  divine  nature  of  the  helpful  answer 
is  not  immediately  comprehensible  to  our 
human  understanding. 

We  must  seek  for  the  value  of  commun- 
ion with  God  exactly  as  we  seek  for  the 
[49] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


value  of  human  friendship.  Only  a  child 
values  his  friend's  love  because  of  the  play- 
things which  the  friend  bestows.  A  mature 
person  values  his  friends  for  deeper  and 
dearer  reasons.  The  true  measure  of  the 
helpfulness  of  the  friendship  lies  not  in  the 
things  which  the  friend  may  bestow,  but  in 
the  influences  which  communion  with  the 
friend  engenders. 

So  the  real  value  of  prayer  is  to  be  sought 
in  a  certain  new  efficiency  which  is  created 
by  men's  communion  with  the  power  of  God. 
We  must  not  think  of  this  new  efficiency 
as  something  which  is  granted  by  God's 
graciousness  alone,  but  as  something  which 
inevitably  results  from  men's  conscious  and 
voluntary  co-operation  with  God's  power. 

There  is  really  no  power  of  God  in  all  the 
world  which  becomes  operative  in  its  great- 
est efficiency  without  the  co-operation  of 
man.  The  sunshine  and  the  rain  may  fall 
upon  both  the  just  and  the  unjust,  but  they 
do  not  accomplish  a  sufficient  harvest  until 
men  till  the  soil  and  plant  the  seed.  The 
stream  runs  merrily  through  the  green 
[50] 


PREVAILING  PRAYER 


meadows  and  the  shady  woods,  and  anybody 
who  will  may  see  its  beauty  and  listen  to  its 
music,  but  the  stream  does  not  grind  the 
miller's  corn  without  the  co-operation  of  the 
man  at  the  water  wheel.  Steam  does  not 
bear  heavy  burdens,  carry  its  millions  of 
passengers,  and  convey  its  tons  of  freight 
until  the  steam  has  become  harnessed  and 
controlled  by  man.  Electricity  does  not 
perform  its  varied  and  helpful  ministry  to 
the  world  without  man's  assistance.  Why, 
then,  should  we  expect  God's  spiritual  forces 
of  health  and  strength  and  trust  and  love 
and  life  to  become  completely  efficient  in 
men's  lives  without  their  co-operation  with 
God? 

Here  is  the  argument  by  analogy.  Com- 
munion with  God  results  in  a  more  efficient 
operation  of  God's  spiritual  forces  in  men's 
lives  just  as  co-operation  with  Him  results 
in  the  efficiency  of  His  physical  forces. 
And  the  results  in  the  one  case  are  really 
as  natural  as  in  the  other. 

And  here  is  the  argument  from  experi- 
ence. Whenever  men  have  communed  with 
[51] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


God,  when,  trying  to  understand  His  na- 
ture of  love,  they  have  gone  to  Him  with 
their  needs  and  with  their  desires,  they  have 
always  been  helped.  That  is  the  universal 
testimony  of  men  whose  word  is  trustworthy. 
When  such  men  tell  us  that  by  turning  a 
button  on  the  wall  of  their  room  they  can 
flood  their  room  with  light,  we  believe  them. 
When  they  tell  us  that  by  putting  themselves 
in  touch  with  the  force  of  God's  love  by 
communion  they  are  able  to  flood  their  souls 
with  the  light  of  hope  and  of  courage  and 
of  new  efficiency,  we  should  likewise  believe 
them.  In  both  instances  they  are  accom- 
plishing the  helpful  results  in  union  with  the 
power  of  God.  In  neither  instance  would 
or  could  the  light  come  without  their  union 
with  Him. 

Prayer  is  the  human  touch  upon  the  divine 
power.  The  result  of  that  touch  is  the  divine 
power  made  operative  and  efficient. 

The  divine  power  is  always  thus  made 

operative.     This  is  the  conception  of  prayer 

and  of  its  value  which  makes  its  helpfulness 

inevitable,  just  because  of  the  immutability 

[52] 


PREVAILING  PRAYER 


of  law.  The  laws  of  spiritual  life  are  as 
changeless  as  are  the  laws  of  gravity  and  of 
evolution.  God's  love  in  the  heart  is  a  con- 
stant force  exactly  as  is  His  power  in  na- 
ture. The  man  who  touches  the  button  must 
alw^ays  receive  the  light,  for  the  divine  power 
which  he  is  thus  utilizing  never  varies. 

But  this  conception  of  prayer,  in  accord 
with  immutable  law  and  love,  suggests  that 
the  petitioner  must  act  only  and  always  in 
harmony  with  that  love.  A  self-seeking 
petition  is  not  prayer  as  it  has  been  here  de- 
fined, for  the  self-seeking  petition  is  not  in 
harmony  with  the  immutability  of  love. 
When  a  man  asks  only  for  those  things 
which  shall  make  life  easier  for  himself,  he  is 
asking  for  the  light  without  the  effort  of  the 
co-operating  touch.  He  is  asking,  but  not 
praying.  But  when  the  petitioner  asks 
either  by  word  or  by  thought  for  those 
things  which  shall  make  his  life  more  use- 
ful, his  friends'  lives  more  useful,  the  entire 
family  of  God's  children  more  in  harmony 
with  each  other  and  with  their  one  Father 
of  love,  then,  so  far  as  we  can  understand 
[53] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


the  nature  and  the  purposes  of  God's  love, 
his  petition  is  in  harmony  with  that  love. 
Then  his  prayer  cannot  be  in  vain.  It  must 
prevail.  He  may  be  mistaken  in  his  estimate 
of  the  helpful  value  of  the  particular  things 
which  he  desires.  That  mistake  is  the  prod- 
uct of  his  human  immaturity.  But  only  let 
him  be  sure  that  he  is  unselfish  in  his  peti- 
tion, and  he  may  ask  in  faith  without  waver- 
ing, assured  from  the  truths  of  nature  as 
well  as  from  the  truths  of  revelation  that 
the  divine  power  by  his  co-operation  will 
become  efficient,  even  in  ways,  it  may  be,  that 
he  cannot  quite  understand. 

''Our  Father,"  so  Jesus  taught  His  dis- 
ciples to  pray,  and  the  address  necessitates 
on  men's  part  both  a  filial  confidence  and  a 
filial  obedience.  We  can  tell  "Our  Father" 
all  our  childish  distresses  and  bring  to  Him 
all  our  childish  desires,  but  the  communion 
with  "Our  Father"  will  not  be  real  nor  will 
its  results  be  efficacious  unless  we  come  to 
Him  in  humble  consecration,  saying,  "Thy 
will  be  done." 


[54] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


CHAPTER        FOUR 


"And  he  arose  and  came  to  his  father.  But  while  he  was 
yet  afar  off,  his  father  saw  him,  and  was  moved  with  compas- 
sion, and  ran,  and  fell  on  his  neck,  and  kissed  him.  And  the 
son  said  unto  him,  '  Father,  I  have  sinned  against  heaven,  and 
in  thy  sight ;  I  am  no  more  worthy  to  be  called  thy  son.'  But 
the  father  said  to  his  servants,  '  Bring  forth  quickly  the  best 
robe,  and  put  it  on  him;  and  put  a  ring  on  his  hand,  and  shoes 
on  his  feet ;  and  bring  the  fatted  calf  and  kill  it,  and  let  us  eat, 
and  make  merry ;  for  this  my  son  was  dead,  and  is  alive  again  : 
he  was  lost,  and  is  found.'" — Luke  15:20-24. 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 

The  study  of  comparative  religions  reveals 
at  least  one  element  which  is  common  to 
them  all.  Indeed,  by  many  students  this 
element  is  thought  to  be  the  cause  of  the 
very  birth  of  religion.  This  common  and 
perhaps  causal  element  is  due  to  the  con- 
sciousness of  all  mankind  of  the  need  of 
what  the  Christian  religion  calls  forgiveness. 
It  is  a  consciousness  born  of  the  sense  of 
un worthiness ;  and  the  sense  of  unworthiness 
in  turn  has  been  induced  by  the  conscious- 
ness of  variance  from  the  will  and  purpose 
of  the  Deity. 

In  primitive  religions  the  need  of  forgive- 
ness found  its  expression  in  crude  and  oft- 
times  horrible  forms  of  propitiatory  rites 
and  ceremonies.  As  civilization  advanced, 
the  propitiatory  rites  became  more  refined. 
There  was,  for  instance,  the  substitution  of 
the  sacrifice  of  the  brute  animal  for  the  hu- 
man individual,  the  slaughter  of  innocent 

[57] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


lambs  and  turtledoves,  instead  of  the  mur- 
der of  innocent  children  and  of  hapless  wo- 
men, but  the  object  of  the  propitiatory  rite 
remained  the  same — to  appease  the  wrath  of 
the  God  who  had  become  estranged  by  men's 
sins. 

When  civilization  had  so  far  advanced 
that  men  could  no  longer  think  of  God  as 
an  angry  Potentate,  but  only  as  a  just  Sov- 
ereign, the  propitiation  by  the  sacrifice  of 
beasts  became,  in  turn,  displaced  by  the  pro- 
pitiation thought  to  inliere  in  the  sacrifice 
of  one  man  once  for  all.  But  even  after 
this  sacrifice,  "once  for  all,"  we  find  men 
still  praying  for  their  restoration  into  that 
harmony  with  God  which  they  felt  had  been 
broken  by  their  own  wrong  doings. 

At  this  day  there  are  professing  Chris- 
tians who  do  not  believe  in  the  propitiatory 
value  of  the  death  of  Jesus,  but  they  all 
believe  in  the  need  of  forgiveness.  There 
are  those  who  deny  the  reality  of  sin,  but 
they  admit  the  fact  of  the  error  of  sin;  and 
the  need  of  the  restoration  of  those  in  error 
to  the  mind  of  God  is  the  same  need  which 
[58] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


most  Christians  call  the  need  of  forgive- 
ness. 

If  we  could  imagine  that  the  conscious- 
ness of  sin  could  be  universally  obliterated 
from  men's  minds,  we  should  not  thereby 
imagine  the  necessary  end  of  all  religion; 
but  we  should  be  imagining  a  modification  of 
rehgion  which  it  is  extremely  hard  for  us 
to  understand.  This  religion  of  the  millen- 
nium would  be  so  different  from  any  form 
of  religion  with  which  we  are  now  familiar 
that  we  should  hardly  recognize  it  as  re- 
ligion at  all.  The  harmonious  community 
of  all  men  in  the  Spirit  of  God  would  be  in 
comparison  with  religion  as  we  know  it,  like 
the  heaven  of  our  anticipation  to  the  earth 
of  our  experience. 

Since  in  this  state  of  existence  we  are  but 
struggling  upward  to  God,  and  in  our  im- 
maturity are  continually  failing  in  our 
struggles,  there  must  always  be  in  the  re- 
ligion of  this  existence  the  desire  for  restora- 
tion into  harmony  with  God.  Until  the 
human  race  becomes  fully  matured,  whether 
in  this  world  or  in  any  world  to  come,  the 
[59] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


consciousness  of  variation  from  God's  will 
must  always  be  a  part  of  every  man's  experi- 
ence, and  the  need  of  restoration  will  always 
be  a  causal,  or  at  least  a  contributory  ele- 
ment in  every  man's  religion. 

It  has,  indeed,  become  customary  in  these 
modern  days  for  Christian  preachers  to  neg- 
lect to  address  their  own  hearers  as  sinners. 
They  have  fallen  into  the  way  of  talking  to 
their  hearers  about  the  sins  of  those  who 
never  come  to  Church,  and  about  the  gen- 
eral sins  of  corporate  bodies  in  society  and 
in  industry.  Perhaps  the  Church  has  come 
to  think  of  its  own  members  and  regular 
attendants  as  not  like  other  men — extor- 
tioners, licentious,  and  openly  corrupt — and 
to  pray  to  God  the  Pharisee's  prayer  of 
gratitude  for  this  self -righteousness,  instead 
of  the  publican's  prayer  of  penitence  for 
sin. 

But  sin  in  its  essence  is  not  open  immor- 
ality. That  is  only  one  of  the  expressions 
of  sin.  Sin  is  just  selfishness.  Sin  is  plac- 
ing one's  own  comfort  and  ease  and  pleasure 
above  the  welfare  of  others.  Sin  is  the  self- 
[60] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


ishness  of  pride,  and  the  selfishness  of  prej- 
udice. Sin  is  the  selfishness  of  narrowness 
and  of  bigotry.  It  is  the  selfishness  of  in- 
difference and  of  unconcern.  It  is  the  self- 
ishness of  neglected  duty  and  of  postponed 
service.  Sin  is  any  kind  of  selfishness  that 
is  ever  felt  or  in  any  manner  expressed. 

With  this  description  of  sin  in  our  minds, 
we  can  but  expect  all  men  to  admit  their 
own  sinfulness.  But  we  do  not,  therefore, 
expect  that  the  admission  will  to-day  cause 
men's  faces  to  blanch  and  their  knees  to 
tremble.  Those  people  who  are  wont  to  look 
back  with  longing  to  the  days  of  the  anxious 
seat,  and  to  complain  that  the  present  age 
has  no  sense  of  the  enormity  of  sin,  are  mis- 
taking the  sense  of  enormity  of  sin  for  the 
fear  of  the  enormity  of  sin's  punishment. 
That  which  has  brought  us  to  the  sense  of 
our  guilt  is  not  fear,  but  love.  With  Jesus' 
teachings  of  the  Father,  we  can  no  longer 
go  to  the  anxious  seat  with  pale  faces, 
praying  an  estranged  God  to  dehver  us  from 
eternal  punishment.  In  our  consciousness 
of  sin  we  are  only  to  go  back  to  the  waiting, 
[61] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


watching,  loving  Father.  Our  concern  is 
not  with  the  question,  can  we  sinners,  by 
any  propitiation,  become  reconciled  to  an  es- 
tranged Sovereign?  This  is  our  concern — 
can  we  sinners  be  restored  to  harmony  with 
the  Father  who  loves  us? 
■  One  of  the  most  searching  objections  to 
the  value  of  religion  is  the  denial  of  the 
possibility  of  sin's  forgiveness.  With  the 
truth  or  falsity  of  this  denial,  religion  as 
we  know  it  will  perish  or  live.  Our  religion 
must  prove  itself  efficient  for  sinners  or  ad- 
mit its  total  inefficiency,  for  it  has  only  con- 
fessed or  unconfessed  sinners  with  whom 
to  deal. 

Here  is  the  line  of  the  familiar  argument 
for  the  impossibility  of  forgiveness.  The 
moral  order,  like  the  natural  order,  is  im- 
mutable and  inviolable.  If  it  were  other- 
wise, we  should  have  no  moral  order  at  all. 
To  believe  that  the  moral  order  can  be  vio- 
lated without  disaster  is  to  introduce  moral 
chaos.  Disaster  must  be  as  inevitable  to  the 
sinner  as  to  him  who  breaks  a  natural  law. 
The  falling  body  will  strike  the  ground. 
[62] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


The  falling  soul  can  expect  only  a  similar 
destination.  "The  soul  that  sinneth,  it 
must  die." 

We  cannot  disprove  this  argument  by  the 
mere  revolt  of  our  souls  against  its  hope- 
less conclusion.  The  common  answer,  which 
unfortunately  is  sometimes  made  in  the  very 
name  of  religion,  that  the  inevitableness  of 
sin's  disaster  cannot  be  true,  because  all  men 
instinctively  shrink  from  its  truth,  is  simply 
puerile  prattle.  Men  also  shrink  from  the 
truth  of  the  inevitableness  of  nature.  When 
it  is  the  body  of  an  innocent  child  who  by 
the  misstep  of  ignorance  is  dashed  to  the 
ground,  who  of  us  does  not  revolt  at  heart 
from  the  seemingly  harsh  inexorableness  of 
nature's  law?  But  in  spite  of  our  revolt, 
nature  goes  serenely  on  its  determined  way. 
Because  we  do  not  any  of  us  really  want 
to  die  in  sin  is  no  valid  argument  against 
the  inevitableness  of  that  death. 

We  can  reasonably  refute  an  argument 
which  is  solidly  based  upon  fact  only  by  the 
interposition  of  other  solid  facts.  Believ- 
ing as  we  must  in  the  inviolability  of  the 
[63] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


moral  order,  we  cannot  reasonably  believe  in 
the  possibility  of  forgiveness  unless  we  can 
show  that  forgiveness  is  not  a  contradiction 
of  that  order,  but  indeed  a  very  part  of  it. 

This  must  be  the  line  of  our  argument  of 
refutation.  The  moral  order  is  immutable 
and  inviolable.  But  what  is  the  moral  or- 
der? Is  the  moral  order  malevolent  or  be- 
nevolent? Is  it  the  product  of  unintelli- 
gent and  heartless  force,  or  the  expression  of 
a  thoughtful  and  loving  will? 

When  we  seek  a  reply  to  this  fair  question, 
we  note  that  even  the  natural  order  is  not 
relentlessly  malevolent.  A  close  scrutiny 
of  nature  reveals  the  presence  everywhere 
of  healing,  remedial  agencies.  The  man 
who  breaks  a  law  of  nature  does  not  in- 
evitably perish.  If  his  violation  of  nature's 
law  makes  him  sick,  there  are  remedies  in  na- 
ture and  power  in  the  God  of  nature  to  cure 
him  of  his  sickness.  If  his  body  is  wounded 
by  his  violation  of  law,  coagulation  will  stop 
the  flow  of  the  blood  from  the  wound,  and 
by  nature's  healing  process  the  new  skin 
will  be  formed. 

[64] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


By  analogy  we  should  expect  to  find,  not 
outside  of  the  moral  order,  but  within  that 
order  itsdf,  some  provision  for  the  cure  of 
the  sinful  soul.  And  when  we  see  every 
day  men,  now  happy  in  the  assurance  of  sins 
forgiven,  who  were  once  miserable  in  unf or- 
given  sin,  we  ought  reasonably  to  regard  this 
spectacle  just  as  we  regard  the  spectacle  of 
the  healthy  man  who  was  once  sick  in  body. 
We  ought  to  regard  it  as  evidence,  not  that 
the  moral  order  itself  has  been  abrogated, 
but  that  the  benevolence  of  the  moral  order 
has  been  vindicated.  Instead  of  the  asser- 
tion that  because  of  the  immutability  of  the 
moral  order  no  sin  can  be  forgiven,  we  must 
assert  that  because  of  the  immutability  of  the 
benevolence  of  that  order  sin  can  be  for- 
given. Over  against  the  sombre  words  of 
the  decree  of  immutable  law,  "The  soul  that 
sinneth,  it  must  die,"  we  then  are  permitted 
to  read  the  glowing  words  of  the  decree  of 
an  equally  immutable  love,  "If  we  confess 
our  sins.  He  is  faithful  and  just  to  forgive 
us  our  sins."  The  moral  order,  like  the 
natural  order,  is  the  expression  of  the  will 
[65] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


of  God,  and  everywhere  we  read  the  truth 
that  God  is  love. 

But  while  we  find  the  place  for  the  for- 
giveness of  sin  in  the  changeless  moral  order 
and  not  outside  it,  we  must  note  that  there 
is  a  prevalent  idea  of  forgiveness  w^hich  is 
wholly  untenable.  It  is  the  idea  that  for- 
giveness means  only  the  remission  of  the  de- 
served punishment  of  sin. 

Such  an  idea  is  unreasonable  from  the 
very  argument  which  makes  forgiveness 
credible.  Forgiveness  is  credible,  as  has  just 
been  indicated,  only  on  the  basis  of  the  im- 
mutability of  the  benevolence  of  the  moral 
order.  To  remit  the  punishment  of  sin 
would  be  as  destructive  to  the  idea  of  be- 
nevolence as  to  the  corresponding  idea  of 
immutability.  If  sin  did  not  always  end  in 
punishment,  the  educational  force  of  the 
moral  order  would  be  altogether  wanting, 
and  there  really  can  be  no  conceivable  be- 
nevolence which  is  not  educational.  Fire 
burns ;  it  always  burns ;  it  always  must  burn ; 
not  only  because  nature  is  changeless,  but 
also  because  nature  is  benevolent.  There 
[66] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


is  no  other  way  for  a  benevolent  nature  to 
teach  men  to  keep  away  from  the  fire  except 
by  the  way  of  the  inevitableness  of  the  con- 
sequence of  fire.  When  men  expect  God  to 
take  away  from  them  all  the  natural  and  in- 
evitable consequences  of  their  wrong  doing, 
they  are  really  expecting  Him  to  act  con- 
trary to  His  nature  of  love.  This,  indeed, 
would  be  the  introduction  into  the  world  of 
God  of  moral  chaos. 

But  this  is  not  the  kind  of  forgiveness 
which  the  children  of  God  need.  This  con- 
ception of  forgiveness  is  as  unhelpful  to 
men  as  it  is  unreasonable.  No  idea  has  done 
more  harm  to  the  religion  of  Jesus  than  this. 
Embracing  this  false  idea,  men  have  called 
themselves  Christians  only  because  of  their 
fear  of  punishment.  They  have  minimized 
the  value  of  Christ's  love  and  sacrifice,  "ac- 
cepting Him"  only  as  the  scapegoat  upon 
whom  their  own  sins  have  been  unjustly 
visited;  and  they  have  settled  down  into  a 
life  of  ease  and  content,  sometimes  to  a  life 
of  continued  sin,  indulging  the  enervating 
delusion  that  the  "blood  of  Jesus"  has  paid 
[67] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


their  ransom  price,  emancipating  them  only 
from  the  punishment  of  sin. 

This  conception  of  the  forgiveness  of  sin 
had  its  logical  development  in  the  sale  of  in- 
dulgence to  sin.  And  though  "indulgences" 
are  no  longer  openly  purchased,  the  debili- 
tating influence  of  the  idea  is  still  present 
in  the  lives  of  those  who  cling  to  their  dar- 
ling sins  in  the  hope  that  by  and  by,  perhaps 
by  means  of  a  hasty  deathbed  confession, 
they  may  find  immunity  from  deserved  pun- 
ishment through  reliance  upon  the  sacrifice 
of  Christ.  The  forgiveness  promised  by 
the  religion  of  Jesus  will  not  become  a  real 
saving  power  in  men's  lives  until  this  false 
and  emasculating  idea  is  completely  aban- 
doned. 

Forgiveness  is  an  act  which  requires  the 
voluntary  co-operation  of  two  persons. 
There  must  be  both  the  person  who  grants 
and  the  person  who  takes.  He  who  has 
been  wronged,  must  be  willing  to  bestow 
mercy;  he  who  has  done  the  wrong,  must 
be  willing  to  receive  the  mercy.  It  does  not 
follow,  therefore,  that  all  sins  must  be  for- 
[68] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


given  because  God  has  revealed  to  men  His 
invariable  mercy.  Before  the  forgiveness 
promised  in  God's  love  becomes  actual,  there 
must  be  added  to  the  willingness  of  God  a 
willingness  in  men. 

The  man  who  does  not  confess  his  sins, 
truly  repent  of  them,  and  heartily  determine 
to  turn  away  from  them,  cannot  reasonably 
expect  forgiveness,  not  because  these  things 
are  arbitrary  conditions  to  God's  offer,  but 
simply  because  they  are  the  only  adequate 
expression  of  the  man's  willingness  to  re- 
ceive. Confession  avails  for  the  sinful  soul 
what  the  recital  of  symptoms  avails  for  the 
diseased  body.  It  is  the  acknowledgment 
of  the  inharmonious  condition.  Repentance 
avails  to  the  sinner  as  a  trustful  submission 
to  the  physician  avails  to  the  sick.  It  is  in 
reality  the  disavowal  of  the  inharmonious 
conditions.  The  determination  to  turn  away 
from  sin  avails  as  does  the  acceptance  of 
the  physician's  prescription  and  the  obedi- 
ence to  the  physician's  orders.  It  is  the 
attempt  to  co-operate  with  the  healing  and 
restoring  agencies. 

[69] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


Without  this  co-operation  of  sinful  men 
with  the  loving  God,  in  spite  of  the  immuta- 
ble benevolence  of  the  moral  order,  which 
is  only  another  way  of  saying,  in  spite  of 
the  eternal  willingness  of  God,  the  sin  will 
remain  un forgiven. 

We  are  ready  now  for  a  definition  of  for- 
giveness. Forgiveness  is  the  restoration  of 
the  sinner  into  the  redemptive,  strengthen- 
ing love  of  God.  It  is  accomplished  by  the 
voluntary  co-operation  of  man  with  God. 
Through  physical  suffering  and  through 
mental  anguish,  through  sorrow  for  the  ir- 
remediable wrong  done  to  one's  self  and  to 
others,  some  of  the  inevitable  punishment  of 
sin  must  persist ;  but  through  the  confession 
and  true  repentance  of  the  sinner,  through 
his  willingness  and  determination  to  come 
back  into  harmony  with  the  moral  order 
which  has  been  violated,  God's  eternal  will- 
ingness to  grant  forgiveness  is  made  opera- 
tive and  the  harmony  is  restored.  The  res- 
toration of  the  harmony  through  confession 
and  true  repentance  is  as  inevitable  in  the 
law  of  God's  love  as  the  unpleasant  con- 
[70] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


sequences  of  sin  are  inevitable  by  the  same 
law. 

Forgiveness,  thus  defined,  must  be  con- 
sidered not  as  a  mere  possibility.  When 
the  necessary  conditions  are  fulfilled,  it  be- 
comes an  unavoidable  certainty.  The  truth 
which  Jesus  taught  and  lived  of  the  Fatherly 
care  of  God,  makes  it  possible  for  no  man 
to  believe  other  than  that  his  truly  repented 
sin  must  be  forgiven.  The  "unforgivable 
sin,"  sometimes  called  the  sin  against  the 
Holy  Ghost,  must  be  considered  only  as  the 
sin  of  continued  impenitence.  Whenever 
any  man,  however  far  he  may  have  wan- 
dered, "comes  to  himself"  and  comes  back 
to  his  Father  of  love,  he  will  always  find 
the  Father  waiting  to  restore  to  him  his  lost 
sonship.  Whenever,  like  the  prodigal  son 
in  the  parable,  he  is  ready  to  say,  "Father, 
I  have  sinned,  but  I  want  to  come  back 
home,  and  I  want  to  be  more  worthy,"  then 
the  kiss  of  forgiveness  will  be  immediate 
and  the  restoration  will  be  complete. 

By  whatever  motive  the  sinner  may  be  in- 
duced to  come  back  into  harmony  with  the 

[71] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


Father's  love  matters  little.  The  prodigal 
of  the  parable  seemingly  "came  to  himself" 
just  because  his  body  became  weary  of  the 
unsatisfying  husks.  Perhaps  his  motive 
was  the  lowest  of  all.  It  may  be  that  the 
highest  motive  is  the  souFs  dissatisfaction 
with  the  uselessness  of  the  life  of  sin,  due  to 
the  soul's  awakening  to  the  virile  desire  to 
be  of  some  use  in  the  world.  But  whatever 
the  motive,  only  let  the  prodigal  go  to  the 
Father  in  penitence,  and  the  Father  will 
forgive,  aye,  must  forgive,  for  the  Father's 
very  nature  is  changeless  love. 

It  is  true,  too,  that  the  restoration  will  be 
complete  by  whatever  road  the  penitent  sin- 
ner may  return.  He  may  accept  some  phil- 
osophical statement  of  the  truth  of  Christ's 
sacrifice  for  him.  Or,  without  any  definite 
knowledge  of  the  philosophy  or  of  the  the- 
ology of  Christ's  religion,  he  may  come  di- 
rectly to  the  Father  Himself,  led  by  the  hand 
of  some  human  friend  who  loves  him.  Or 
he  may  come  back  to  the  Father,  guided 
thereto  by  the  echo  in  his  heart  of  some 
single  word  of  hope  and  of  encouragement. 

[72] 


SAVING  FORGIVENESS 


There  are  many  ways  to  the  heart  of  the 
Father's  love,  and  no  single  interpretation 
of  Christ's  religion  can  justly  claim  a  mo- 
nopoly of  those  ways.  The  mercy  of  God's 
forgiveness  is  ready  for  all  those  who  come 
by  any  of  the  different  ways,  provided  only 
that  they  come  in  penitence,  willing  to  re- 
ceive the  forgiveness  which  God  is  ever  will- 
ing to  bestow. 

And  this  is  what  the  forgiveness  will  al- 
ways accomplish  in  any  man's  life.  It  will 
give  him  new  efficiency  for  helpful  service 
in  the  world.  One  could  wish  that  Jesus 
had  carried  the  story  of  the  prodigal  a  little 
farther.  We  should  like  to  know  what  hap- 
pened to  that  wayward  son  after  his  restora- 
tion to  his  father's  home.  Was  he  never 
again  tempted  to  go  away  into  new  scenes  of 
prodigality?  But  w^e  are  left  to  answer 
this  interesting  query  only  by  reference  to 
our  own  experiences  and  to  the  experiences 
of  our  friends  and  acquaintances.  From 
what  we  know  of  ourselves  and  from  what 
we  observe  in  others,  we  cannot  believe  that 
the  father's  ready  forgiveness  completely 
[73] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


eradicated  from  the  son's  heart  all  sinful 
tendencies.  Forgiveness  is  not  the  end  of 
salvation,  which  in  its  essence  is  the  develop- 
ment of  noble  and  serviceable  character.  It 
is  just  the  beginning  of  salvation.  After 
the  forgiveness  there  may  come  new  tempta- 
tions. But  the  restoration  to  the  lost  son- 
ship  in  the  Father's  love  gives  new  powers 
of  resistance.  The  practical  value  of  it  all 
to  any  man  is  just  this  new  power  of  re- 
sistance and  this  new  power  of  helpfulness. 
It  is  the  reawakening  of  the  heart  of  the 
sinner  to  consciousness  of  his  obhgations, 
his  privileges,  and  his  powers  as  the  son  of 
God.  It  is  the  restoration  of  his  sonship. 
The  forgiveness  that  will  save  us  is  the 
assured  forgiveness  of  the  Father's  love  co- 
operating with  our  willingness,  enabling  us 
to  live  not  merely  in  the  hope  of  future  bliss 
in  His  mercy,  but  in  the  practice  of  a  present 
usefulness  in  His  service. 


[74] 


ABUNDANT   HEALTH 


CHAPTER     FIVE 


"  He  called  the  twelve  together  and  gave  them  power  and 
authority  over  all  devils,  and  to  cure  diseases.  And  he  sent 
them  forth     ...     to  heal  the  sick." — Luke  9:1,  2. 


ABUNDANT  HEALTH 

It  is  narrated  in  the  Gospels  that  the  im- 
prisoned John  the  Baptist,  in  a  moment  of 
doubt,  sent  two  disciples  to  Jesus  who  asked 
Him  this  direct  question,  "Art  Thou  He  that 
should  come,  or  do  we  look  for  another?" 
Jesus  did  not  meet  the  question  with  a  dog- 
matic assertion,  nor  with  a  metaphysical  ar- 
gument. His  answer  was  couched  in  the 
form  of  a  visible  demonstration.  "In  that 
same  hour,"  the  narrative  of  Luke  states, 
"He  cured  many  of  diseases  and  plagues  and 
evil  spirits ;  and  on  many  that  were  blind  He 
bestowed  sight."  After  He  had  performed 
this  helpful  ministry  to  men's  suffering 
bodies.  He  turned  to  the  emissaries  of  the 
doubting  Forerunner  and  said  to  them,  "Go, 
tell  John  what  things  ye  have  seen." 

As  we  proceed  with  the  biography  of 
Jesus,  we  discover  that  not  only  did  He 
Himself  claim  to  demonstrate  God's  power 
by  healing  the  sick,  but  He  bade  His  dis- 
ciples to  do  likewise.     The  inference  from 

[77] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


this  extension  of  the  healing  ministry  is  quite 
plain.  Jesus  did  not  believe  that  the  power 
to  cure  the  sick  was  a  peculiar  power  resi- 
dent only  in  Himself,  but  that  it  was  a 
power  universally  practicable  by  all  who 
should  follow  His  example  and  become  im- 
bued with  His  spirit. 

The  history  of  the  development  of  Christ's 
religion,  however,  reveals  the  fact  that  all 
of  the  followers  of  Jesus  appar^^tly  have 
not  accepted  His  view  of  the  inevitable 
relation  between  God's  power  and  men's 
bodies.  The  professed  Christians  of  the 
first  century,  it  is  true,  are  reported  to  have 
cured  diseases,  but  the  twentieth  century 
Christians  are  accustomed  to  denominate 
such  powers  as  "miracles,"  more  or  less  in- 
credible and  altogether  inexplicable.  Some 
of  the  "saints"  of  the  Middle  Ages  are  also 
said  to  have  performed  "miraculous"  cures; 
and  the  twentieth  century  is  wont  to  look 
upon  these  reports  only  as  the  evidence  of 
the  credulity  and  superstition  of  an  unsci- 
entific age.  So  far  have  we  of  the  pres- 
ent day  divorced  ourselves  in  this  particu- 
[78] 


ABUNDANT  HEALTH 


lar  from  Christ's  teaching  and  practice,  that 
when  a  certain  sect  of  Christians  now  claims 
to  demonstrate  God's  power  by  healing 
men's  bodies,  the  great  majority  of  Christ's 
professed  followers  are  moved  either  to  jeers 
or  to  bitter  denunciation. 

What  is  the  reason  for  this  departure 
from  the  practice  and  the  evident  thought 
of  Jesus?  Here  are  the  commonly  offered 
explanations. 

Christ  cured  diseases,  it  is  said,  not  be- 
cause such  cures  were  an  essential  part  of 
His  ministry,  but  only  because  in  the  age 
which  looked  for  signs  and  wonders  these 
miracles  were  the  only  way  by  which  He 
could  attract  men's  attention  and  win  their 
confidence.  This  explanation  makes  the 
Christian  care  for  the  bodies  of  men  only 
an  incidental  and  temporary  manifestation 
of  God's  power,  a  first  century  means  to  an 
end,  the  end,  of  course,  being  the  manifesta- 
tion of  God's  forgiving  love  applied  to 
men's  souls. 

A  second  explanation  of  the  cures  of 
Christ  and  of  His  immediate  disciples  sug- 

[79] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


gests  that  this  ministry  to  men's  bodily 
needs  was  performed  only  because  there  was 
in  Christ's  time  no  adequate  scientific  treat- 
ment of  diseases,  and  that  cures  in  Christ's 
name  are  no  longer  possible  because  now 
they  are  unneeded.  By  the  logic  of  this 
explanation,  the  science  of  medicine  is  con- 
ceived as  having  usurped  this  particular 
work  of  Jesus.  Drugs  and  tonics  have  ab- 
rogated the  power  of  His  healing  word  and 
touch. 

There  is  truth  in  both  of  these  explana- 
tions. Undoubtedly  the  spectacular  and 
seemingly  miraculous  method  by  which 
Jesus  performed  His  cures  was  both  a  de- 
mand and  a  product  of  the  age  in  which  He 
lived.  It  is  also  undoubtedly  true  that  had 
Christ's  age  possessed  our  modern,  God-in- 
spired equipments  for  the  treatment  of  dis- 
eases, at  least  the  manner  of  His  cures  would 
have  been  modified. 

But  neither  of  these  explanations  is  quite 
sufficient.  The  cures  of  Jesus  were  some- 
thing more  than  "miracles."  They  were 
benefactions.  The  significant  element  in 
[80] 


ABUNDANT  HEALTH 


His  healing  ministry  was  not  the  incredible 
wonder,  but  the  pitying  love.  And  science 
never  can  abrogate  the  need  of  the  healing 
ministry  of  love.  It  seems  that  Jesus  loved 
the  whole  man — the  soul  which  his  body  but 
dimly  revealed,  and  the  body  which  was  the 
soul's  medium  of  development  and  of  ex- 
pression. The  sick  man,  like  the  sinful 
man,  was  to  Jesus  out  of  harmony  with 
God's  plan,  therefore  he  was  to  be  pitied 
and  saved.  It  was  Christ's  desire  and  at- 
tempt to  make  men  "every  whit  whole." 

If  the  followers  of  Jesus  have  lost  any 
part  of  that  desire,  they  have  lost  a  part  of 
the  Christ-like  breadth  of  S3anpathy.  If 
they  have  ceased  to  make  the  attempt  to  save 
any  part  of  the  man  that  needs  salvation, 
they  have  ceased  to  perform  a  part  of  the 
Christ-like  ministry.  To  the  followers  of 
Him  who  came  to  save  the  whole  man  to  his 
best  estate  the  sick  must  still  arouse  pity, 
and  unless  the  religion  of  Jesus  can  help  the 
sick  in  body,  it  will  ever  have  hard  work  to 
prove  that  it  can  helj)  the  sick  in  soul. 

But  when  we  admit  that  the  twentieth 
[81] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


century  disciples  of  Jesus  should,  like  Christ 
Himself,  demonstrate  the  power  and  the 
love  of  God  by  healing  the  sick,  we  must 
not  limit  these  modern  disciples  to  Christ's 
exact  method  of  healing.  We  call  Christ's 
cures  miraculous  because  we  do  not  quite 
understand  the  manner  of  their  accomplish- 
ment, and  we  are  prone  to  limit  the  use  of 
the  term  "Christian  healing"  to  similar,  un- 
usual, and  apparently  inexplicable  achieve- 
ments. Thus  we  say  that  a  physician  cures 
by  science,  but  that  a  Christian  must  cure 
by  "faith."  We  call  the  results  of  the 
ministry  of  the  country  doctor  natural,  and 
the  results  of  the  ministry  of  some  "faith 
healer,"  or  "Christian  Scientist  healer,"  su- 
pernatural. But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  one 
kind  of  cure  is  no  more  wonderful  than 
another.  No  cure  is  explicable  except  it 
be  attributed  to  that  unknown  redemptive 
power  which  some  people  call  nature  and 
others  God. 

In  all  cases  of  cure  the  necessary  condi- 
tion and  the  contributory  cause  is  an  obedi- 
ent and  reposeful  trust.       The  healer,  to 
[82] 


ABUNDANT  HEALTH 


whatever  school  he  may  belong,  who  can 
command  such  trust,  creates  the  condition 
under  which  the  redemptive  power  of  God, 
or  nature,  accomplishes  the  beneficent  re- 
sult. And  any  philosophy  or  so-called 
''Christian  Science,"  or  rehgious  belief  which 
can  induce  this  essential  condition  to  health, 
has  as  much  right  to  the  claim  of  heahng 
power  as  has  any  accredited  physician  the 
world  has  ever  known. 

Right  here  is  where  the  true  religion  of 
Jesus  Christ  makes  its  claim  to  the  contin- 
ued power  to  minister  to  the  bodies  of  men. 
The  religion  of  Jesus,  when  rightly  under- 
stood and  truly  appropriated  into  one's  hf  e, 
can  and  does  induce  this  essential  condition 
and  cause  of  health.  If  a  man  has  truly 
accepted  Christ's  religion,  he  believes  that 
God  is  his  Father,  and  that  his  Father  doeth 
all  things  well.  He  practices  obedience  to 
his  Father's  will,  as  made  known  to  him  by 
the  discovered  laws  of  hygiene  as  well  as 
by  the  revealed  laws  of  love.  He  therefore 
lives,  or  at  least  the  Christian  should  Kve, 
in  obedient  and  reposeful  trust.  This 
[83] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


causal  condition  of  health  in  himself  he 
makes  operative  in  the  lives  of  others  by  the 
power  of  his  influence. 

It  would,  indeed,  be  a  sad  thing  for  the 
world  if  the  health-producing  confidence  in 
God  were  the  possession  only  of  those  who 
believe  in  the  teachings  of  Mrs.  Eddy,  or  of 
any  other  modern  exponent  of  a  single  heal- 
ing cult.  This  health-producing  confidence 
is  the  heritage  of  all  who,  through  Christ's 
teachings,  have  come  vitally  to  trust  in  the 
Father's  love.  And  wherever,  under  the 
particular  name  of  whatever  sect  or  cult, 
that  trust  becomes  a  reality  in  the  life,  its 
influence  upon  the  health  of  the  body  is 
inevitable.  The  religion  of  Jesus  still  makes 
and  keeps  men  well,  because  that  religion 
is  based  upon  the  Christ-taught  confidence 
in  God. 

This  apparent  generalization  is  not  an 
evasion  of  the  issue  before  us.  At  first 
thought  it  may  seem  that  the  Christian  who 
is  merely  obedient  and  reposeful  in  his  con- 
fidence in  God  falls  very  short  of  obedi- 
ence to  Christ's  specific  command  to  His  dis- 
[84] 


ABUNDANT  HEALTH 


ciples  to  heal  the  sick.  And  the  somewhat 
general  health-giving  atmosphere  which  such 
Christians  create  by  their  influence  may 
seem  very  different  from  the  specific  cures 
which  the  earlier  disciples  performed,  and 
which  certain  sects  of  modern  disciples  still 
perform.  The  apparent  difference,  how- 
ever, is  due  to  the  fact  already  noted,  that 
we  are  wont  to  limit  the  operation  of  the 
Christian's  healing  power  to  the  first  century 
methods.  But  really  in  the  Christian's  heal- 
ing power  as  well  as  in  Christ's  power  the 
significant  element  is  not  the  miraculous 
method  of  the  cure,  but  still  just  the  bene- 
faction of  love.  It  may  be  doubted  whether 
the  disciples  were  commanded  to  perform 
miracles  when  they  were  sent  out  to  heal 
the  sick.  They  were  commanded  only  to 
help  their  fellow-men  in  their  present  needs. 
With  unwarranted  assumption  we  have 
called  their  obedience  to  that  command  mi- 
raculous, but  we  must  remember  that  the 
obedience  had  been  as  real  and  as  efficacious, 
even  though  we  could  explain  all  the  details 
by  which  the  cures  were  performed. 
[85] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


It  is  quite  possible  that  the  science  of 
psychology,  in  its  relation  to  therapeutics, 
may  sometimes  reduce  the  cures  of  Jesus  and 
of  His  disciples  to  natural  effects  from  nat- 
ural causes.  Indeed,  the  only  way  we  can 
reasonably  believe  in  the  cures  which  to  us 
now  seem  miraculous,  is  to  believe  that  the 
miraculous  element  is  present  only  because 
we  do  not  know  enough  of  the  operation  of 
spiritual  laws  to  understand  just  how  the 
cures  were  accomplished.  But  if  the  happy 
day  comes  when  the  "miracle"  shall  be  ex- 
plained away,  the  cure  itself  will  have  lost 
none  of  its  wonder  as  the  evidence  of  the 
power  of  God's  pitying,  saving  love. 

And  so  if  we  say  concerning  the  modern 
power  of  Christ's  religion  to  cure  that  the 
power  is  becoming,  in  some  degree,  expli- 
cable by  the  modern  understanding  of  psy- 
chologic conditions,  we  do  not  detract  one 
whit  from  the  truth  that  it  is  still  God's 
power  of  pitying,  saving  love  that  performs 
the  cure.  When  we  say  that  real  confidence 
in  God  will  produce  the  conditions  of  obedi- 
ence and  repose  essential  to  health,  and  that 
[86] 


ABUNDANT  HEALTH 


such  obedience  and  repose  must  have  their 
inevitable  influence  upon  the  health  of 
others,  we  may  be  talking  in  the  language 
of  modern  psychology,  but  we  are  none  the 
less  talking  also  the  language  of  the  heal- 
ing power  of  God. 

We  cannot  reasonably  discredit  in  toto 
the  claims  of  the  modern  "faith  healer"  and 
the  "Christian  Scientist"  any  more  than  we 
can  discredit  the  cures  of  Jesus  and  of  His 
early  disciples.  For  what  evidence  have  we 
that  God  is  limited  as  to  the  method  of  the 
operation  of  His  healing  power?  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  we  must  not  limit  Christ's 
healing  to  any  of  these  particular  ways  in 
which  cures  have  been  or  may  be  accom- 
plished. In  so  far  as  these  methods  result 
in  good,  in  so  far  are  they  evidence,  not  that 
God's  power  works  in  any  one  exclusive 
method,  but  that  many  methods  may  accom- 
plish the  necessary  condition  of  health. 

Mrs.  Eddy,  evidently  upon  the  founda- 
tion of  other  thinkers  who  had  preceded 
her,  built  up  a  system  of  philosophy  which 
she  called  a  science.     She  said  that  God  was 

[87] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


all  and  that  God  was  good,  and  that  there- 
fore nothing  that  was  not  good  could  exist. 
Disease  and  sin  to  her  were  unreal,  the 
"errors"  of  "mortal  mind."  To  demonstrate 
the  truth  of  this  philosophy  she  claimed  the 
power  to  make  sick  people  well.  "Here  is 
a  man  who  once  believed  he  was  ill;  now  he 
believes  he  is  well.  Therefore,  the  truth  of 
my  assertions  of  the  nothingness  of  dis- 
ease and  of  the  allness  of  God  has  been  vin- 
dicated." That  was  her  argument.  But 
really  Mrs.  Eddy  not  only  claimed  too  much 
from  her  "demonstration;"  there  was  a  cer- 
tain sense  in  which  she  claimed  too  little. 

This  man,  who  by  the  acceptance  of  her 
interpretation  of  religion  has  been  brought 
into  buoyant  health,  has  not  demonstrated 
the  truth  of  Mrs.  Eddy's  philosophy,  but  he 
has  done  much  more  than  that.  He  has 
demonstrated  the  energizing,  health-giving 
power  of  a  simple  confidence  in  God.  Once 
he  lived  in  dread  of  the  omnipresent  germs 
of  disease.  Now  he  trusts  the  omnipresence 
of  the  divine  love.  Once  he  worried  about 
his  work  and  about  his  friends,  about  the 
[88] 


ABUNDANT  HEALTH 


possible  ill-effects  of  what  happened  yester- 
day, and  the  probable  ill-effects  of  what  he 
was  afraid  would  happen  to-morrow.  Now 
he  dwells  securely  in  his  trust  in  the  God  of 
love  who  is  the  same  yesterday,  to-day,  and 
forever.  Is  it  any  wonder  that  his  health 
has  become  energized?  Is  it  in  any  degree 
remarkable  that  his  physical  powers  have  be- 
come strengthened? 

But  he  who  has  accepted  any  other  of  the 
many  prevailing  interpretations  of  Christ's 
religion  can  have  the  same  health-giving 
trust  in  the  changeless,  omnipotent,  and  om- 
nipresent God  of  love.  He  ought  to  have 
it.  He  must  have  it,  if  his  Christianity  be 
real.  And  when  he  has  that  trust,  what- 
ever may  be  his  accepted  creed  or  his  de- 
nominational preference,  he  has  all  that  the 
professed  Christian  Scientist  has  or  can 
have.  He  has  that  which  can  and  must  en- 
ergize all  his  physical  powers  to  the  efficient 
performance  of  all  his  required  physical 
labours;  for  he  has  that  which  dispels  all 
disease-producing  fear  and  worry,  and  that 
which  promotes  a  health-producing  obedi- 

[89] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


ence  to  the  laws  of  physical  well-being.  He 
has  been  made  whole  by  the  religion  of 
Jesus,  and  if  he  lives  in  his  confidence  in 
God  and  inculcates  a  like  confidence  in 
others,  he  has  helped  to  make  them  whole. 

It  is  confidence  in  God,  then,  and  not  con- 
fidence in  any  of  the  interpretations  of  re- 
ligion, which  creates  the  abundant  health. 

The  truth  of  this  assertion  of  the  healing 
power  of  confidence  in  God  is  reasonably 
based  upon  the  revealed  truth  of  the  Holy 
Word.  It  is  re-enforced  by  the  conception 
and  practice  of  Jesus  Himself.  It  is 
strengthened  by  the  modern  discoveries  in 
psychological  and  religious  therapeutics. 
But  the  truth  of  the  assertion  cannot  be 
proven  to  any  individual  except  by  trial  and 
success.  It  cannot  be  disproven  except  by 
trial  and  failure.  Try  it  for  yourselves. 
Live  obediently,  unafraid,  and  undisturbed 
in  the  confidence  that  God  is  love,  and  see 
what  that  confidence  will  do  for  you.  Live 
in  that  confidence  and  see  what,  through  its 
influence,  you  can  do  for  others. 


[90] 


SUFFICIENT  CONSOLATION 
CHAPTER        SIX 


"I  will  pray  the  Father,  and  he  shall  give  you  another 
Comforter,  that  he  may  abide  with  you  forever.  .  .  .  He  shall 
teach  you  all  things,  and  bring  all  things  to  your  remembrance 
whatsoever  I  have  said  unto  you." — John  14:  16,  26. 


SUFFICIENT  CONSOLATION 

Apparently  many  people  believe  that  the 
principal  use  of  religion  is  to  be  found  in 
its  promised  consolation.  This  mistaken 
notion  is  seemingly  held  not  only  by  the  mul- 
titudes who  never  think  of  embracing  re- 
ligion at  all  except  in  time  of  sorrow,  but 
also  by  many  of  the  very  exponents  of  re- 
ligion who  are  wont  to  present  it,  dressed, 
as  it  were,  always  in  the  garb  of  mourning. 
Thus  preachers  of  the  religion  of  Jesus  have 
been  known  to  tell  the  happy  youths  in  their 
congregations  that  though  they  may  not  feel 
the  need  of  religion  now,  when  sorrows 
and  troubles  come,  when  they  get  old  and 
when  they  must  think  of  death,  then  they 
will  need  religion  for  consolation  and  for 
help.  It  is,  perhaps,  only  natural  that  these 
happy  youths,  thus  instructed,  should  in- 
definitely postpone  their  acceptance  of  re- 
ligion, while  for  the  present  they  continue 
serenely  to  amuse  themselves  as  they  please 
[93] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


SO  long  as  the  dreaded  troubles  are  delayed. 
For  why  should  funeral  flowers  be  pur- 
chased while  life  is  still  vigorous? 

Of  course,  this  is  an  inadequate  concep- 
tion of  the  value  of  religion,  and  doubtless 
it  is  not  at  all  the  conception  held  by  those 
whose  words  and  acts  seem  to  imply  it.  Un- 
less the  religion  of  Jesus  has  a  universal  ap- 
plication to  all  phases  of  human  life — to 
life's  joys  as  well  as  to  its  sorrows,  to  its 
youthful  aspirations  as  well  as  to  its  ageful 
reminiscences — then  we  must  consider  that 
religion  is  at  best  only  of  temporary  value 
to  men,  and  we  must  admit  that  its  tempo- 
rary value  is  due  altogether  to  the  continued 
presence  in  the  world  of  the  evils  of  sin  and 
of  sorrow  and  of  death,  which  Jesus  came 
to  overcome.  For,  indeed,  Jesus  came  into 
the  world  not  merely  to  console  those  who 
were  miserable,  but  to  remove  the  misery 
that  needed  consolation.  The  greater  part 
of  His  ministry  was  in  vain  if  His  religion 
is  only  a  consolation  for  the  sorrowful  and 
the  dying. 

But  on  the  other  hand,  while  we  vehe- 
[94] 


SUFFICIENT   CONSOLATION 


mently  deny  that  the  only  or  even  the  prin- 
cipal value  of  religion  hes  in  its  consolatory 
power,  we  must  admit  that  unless  the  reli- 
gion of  Jesus  can  and  does  console,  it  be- 
comes a  failure  just  where  its  success  is  most 
needed.  To  those  who  have  come  to  the 
extremities  of  hfe,  the  religion  of  Jesus 
must  be  able  to  furnish  a  sufficient  consola- 
tion, or  all  the  other  promised  blessings  of 
that  rehgion  will  become  null  and  void. 

Consolation  is  only  one  of  the  helps  of  re- 
ligion. Like  the  hfe-preserver  thrown  to 
the  man  who  has  fallen  overboard,  it  is  a 
help  immediately  demanded  by  the  exigen- 
cies of  the  situation.  But  if  the  help  be 
denied  to  the  strugghng,  perishing  man  in 
the  deep  waters,  the  Christian  assurance  of 
God's  love  and  God's  care  will  avail  only 
as  "sounding  brass  or  a  clanging  cymbal." 

It  may  be  true  that  there  are  some  few 
souls  who  are  never  forced  to  struggle  in 
the  deep  waters.  Possibly  there  is  now  and 
then  one  who  is  born  into  kindly  surround- 
ings, whose  youth  is  carefully  guarded, 
whose  maturity  is  serene,  and  whose  death 
[95] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


is  peaceful  and  hopeful.  If  there  be  such 
an  one,  he  is  the  type  of  what  ought  to  be, 
and  of  what  would  be  if  all  mankind  should 
come  into  right  relations  with  God  and  with 
life;  of  what  will  be,  we  can  reasonably 
hope,  when  the  religion  of  Jesus  shall  have 
reached  the  maturity  of  its  influence  in  the 
inauguration  of  the  millennial  age  of  health 
and  of  joy,  of  trust  and  of  love. 

But  meanwhile  these  types  of  what  ought 
to  be,  if  they  exist  at  all,  are  very  excep- 
tional cases.  As  yet  the  millennial  age  has 
not  dawned.  Now  most  people  who  are 
normally  alive  are  at  some  time  or  other 
engulfed  in  the  dark  waters  of  sorrow.  It 
may  be  true  in  some  instances  that  they  have 
fallen  into  the  water  themselves.  Their  own 
ignorance,  their  carelessness,  or  their  sinful- 
ness may  have  caused  the  fall.  It  some- 
times seems,  however,  that  some  one  else  has 
pushed  a  fellow-man  into  the  water.  In- 
deed, the  weak  and  the  incompetent  are  al- 
ways being  thrown  overboard  by  the  strong 
and  the  capable,  and  one  cannot  readily  see 
how,  in  this  world  of  competition  and  in 
[96] 


SUFFICIENT   CONSOLATION 


accord  with  the  law  of  the  "survival  of  the 
fittest,"  it  can  be  otherwise. 

But  sometimes  it  really  seems  as  though 
God  Himself  had  thrown  men  into  the 
waters  of  affliction,  which  are  far  deeper 
than  the  height  of  their  puny  human  intel- 
lects. It  is  true  that  under  the  head  of  "the 
mysterious  Providence,"  we  are  all  too  prone 
to  catalogue  many  sorrows  which  are 
brought  upon  us  either  by  ourselves  or  by 
other  human  beings.  But  when  we  make 
all  due  allowances  for  this  common  tendency 
to  blame  God  for  what  men  themselves  are 
responsible,  there  remains  a  considerable 
residue  of  human  sorrow  in  which  the  human 
intellect  is  unable  to  trace  the  hand  of  man. 

Of  all  the  "mysterious  Providences,"  the 
most  mysterious,  perhaps,  is  the  inevitable- 
ness,  but  withal  the  unexpectedness  of  death. 
As  a  general  axiom,  every  man  knows  that 
everybody  must  die,  but  the  normal  man  is 
never  quite  ready  specifically  to  apply  the 
axiom  either  to  himself  or  to  his  own  loved 
ones.  It  is  always  at  an  unexpected  mo- 
ment that  our  dear  ones  are  snatched  from 
[97] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


the  arms  of  our  protecting  love.  And 
though  we  well  know  that  the  same  fate 
awaits  ourselves,  the  inevitable  Angel  is  still 
the  unexpected  Angel  when  He  comes  to 
take  us,  too,  away.  Who  is  it  who  thrusts 
us  beneath  these  overwhelming  waters  of  be- 
reavement and  of  death?  Who,  unless  it 
be  the  God  whom  we  call  the  God  of  love, 
but  whose  ways  we  do  not,  cannot  under- 
stand? 

Now  if  the  basal  proposition  of  the  Chris- 
tian religion  be  true,  that  God  is  love,  we 
must  believe  that  whatever  the  cause  of  the 
sorrow,  the  cure  of  the  sorrow  is  certain. 
If  God  Himself  is  responsible  for  the  sor- 
row. He  surely  is  a  God  of  cruel  caprice 
and  not  at  all  a  God  of  love  if  in  some  way 
He  does  not  make  the  harsh  experience  a 
means  to  a  benevolent  end.  If  the  deep 
waters  engulf  the  soul  because  of  the 
thoughtlessness  or  selfishness  of  other  men, 
we  have  reason  to  expect  that  the  mere  jus- 
tice of  God,  to  say  nothing  of  His  mercy, 
would  not  permit  the  innocent  to  suffer  in- 
consolably.  If  we  find  that  the  man  has 
[98] 


SUFFICIENT   CONSOLATION 


been  plunged  into  the  deep  waters  because 
of  his  own  sinful  neglect,  even  then  we  can- 
not beheve  that  a  God  who  is  love  could 
watch  his  dying  struggles  and  offer  no  help. 
If  God  could  conceivably  excuse  Himself 
from  helping  that  struggling  man  with  the 
declaration  that  the  suffering  and  sorrow 
are  self-inflicted,  God's  compassion  could 
conceivably  become  less  than  man's,  for  no 
real  man  can  complacently  suffer  another 
to  drown,  however  careless  or  sinful  that 
other  has  been. 

We  are  not,  then,  forced  to  diagnose  each 
case  of  sorrow  before  we  can  expect  the 
application  of  the  Christian  remedy  of  con- 
solation. We  cannot  say  that  some  sorrows 
are  consolable  and  that  others  must  be  con- 
sidered as  inconsolable.  We  must  boldly 
declare  that  in  the  religion  of  Jesus  there 
is  consolation  for  all  sorrow,  whatever  its 
cause,  or  we  must  logically  admit  the  re- 
ligion of  Jesus  to  be  a  pitiable  failure. 

It  is  necessary  here  that  we  understand 
exactly  what  is  meant  by  the  term  "conso- 
lation," for  certain  prevalent,  mistaken  ideas 
[99] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


of  the  nature  of  the  consolation  of  rehgion 
have  brought  confusion  to  many  and  have 
plunged  some  into  the  darkness  of  cynical 
despair. 

There  is,  first  of  all,  the  mistaken  idea  of 
the  Christian  fatalist,  who  believes  that  con- 
solation may  be  found  in  an  unreasoning 
and  uncomplaining  submission  to  God. 
"Though  He  slay  me,  yet  will  I  trust  in 
Him,"  replied  Job  to  the  friends  who  sought 
to  comfort  him  in  his  distresses.  And  in 
spite  of  Christ's  clear  revelation  of  the  God 
of  love  and  compassion,  there  are  many  of 
the  professed  followers  of  Christ  who  at- 
tempt to  find  consolation  in  the  religious 
fatalism  of  this  semi-pagan.  This  is  the 
black  philosophy  of  fatalism  tinged,  but  not 
beautified,  with  the  color  of  religion.  Con- 
sidered as  consolation,  it  is  cold  and  com- 
fortless. It  assumes  that  God,  in  His  un- 
knowableness,  is  an  arbitrary,  autocratic 
Sovereign,  and  that  man  is  at  best  only  the 
creature  of  God. 

At  the  opposite  extreme  of  religious 
thought  we  find  the  mistaken  idea  that  con- 
[100] 


SUFFICIENT   CONSOLATION 


solation  is  to  be  obtained  not  in  stoical  sub- 
mission, but  in  insensible  forget  fulness. 
"The  sorrow  that  comes  to  us  cannot  be 
helped:  therefore  we  will  seek  to  forget  it." 
Not  all  of  the  people  who  embrace  this  phi- 
losophy proceed  to  "eat,  drink,  and  be 
merry."  Perhaps  the  most  of  them  just 
keep  on  attending  to  their  daily  business  and 
performing  their  daily  duties.  When  the 
sorrow  which  they  cannot  wholly  overcome 
obtrudes  itself  upon  their  memories,  they 
plunge  all  the  harder  into  their  absorbing 
labours.  The  people  of  this  philosophy 
who  have  learned  to  call  themselves  Chris- 
tians, have  found  in  Christianity  no  sub- 
stitute for  the  philosophy,  but  only  a  slight 
modification  of  its  expression.  These  Chris- 
tian philosophers  say:  "Our  hope  is  in  toil — 
not  merely  for  ourselves,  but  for  others. 
We  must  seek  the  f orgetf ulness  of  our  own 
sorrow  in  incessant,  thought-absorbing  serv- 
ice of  others." 

To  many  Christians  this  appears  to  be 
the  very  ideal  for  the  sorrowing  soul  to 
pursue.     Indeed,  there  is  an  element  of  true 
[101] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


and  Christlike  greatness  in  this  attempt  to 
assuage  grief  by  a  self- forgetful  service 
of  others.  Nor  can  anyone  who  has  not 
tried  it  deny  the  efficacy  of  this  method  of 
the  treatment  of  sorrow. 

The  contention  is  here  made,  however, 
that  the  surcease  of  sorrow,  which  may  be 
induced  by  the  way  of  forget  fulness,  is  not 
really  consolation  at  all.  The  man  who 
takes  to  drink  may  find  surcease  of  sorrow 
in  the  exhilaration  or  the  stupefaction  of 
his  indulgence.  And  what  more  does  he 
obtain  who  seeks  relief  in  incessant  toil,  aye, 
even  in  unselfish  toil  for  others? 

This  proposed  remedy  is  at  best  a  sorry 
makeshift.  It  is  like  the  prescri23tion  of 
a  drug  to  heal  a  painful  wound.  The 
drug  may  cause  the  pain  of  the  wound  to 
cease,  but  it  unfortunately  does  not  help 
to  heal  the  wound  itself.  If  the  drug- 
produced  insensibility  be  continued  long 
enough,  of  course,  the  wound  may  become 
healed  by  nature.  And  some  people,  carry- 
ing out  the  analogy,  have  hoped,  by  work 
and  service,  to  continue  their  insensibility 
[102] 


SUFFICIENT  CONSOLATION 


to  sorrow  until  Time  shall  have  had 
opportunity  to  heal  the  wounded  heart. 
But  is  Time  the  only  healer  which  the  Chris- 
tian religion  has  to  offer  to  the  distressed 
and  suffering  soul?  Is  there  no  balm  in 
Gilead  that  can  soothe  the  pain  of  the  wound 
by  healing  the  wound  itself?  Must  we  al- 
ways and  only  try  to  forget?  But  really 
we  know  it  is  impossible  to  forget.  It  is 
not  only  our  minds  that  will  not  permit  the 
f orgetf ulness ;  our  hearts  forbid  it.  Our 
yearning  love  craves  the  boon  of  memory 
and  will  brook  no  denial  of  the  boon,  even 
though  the  memory  be  accompanied  by  bitter 
anguish. 

We  are  brought  by  these  considerations 
to  this  statement  of  the  truth.  Xo  consola- 
tion can  suffice  the  reasoning  mind  and  the 
loving  heart  of  man  which  demands  even 
the  temporary  disuse  of  any  of  his  God- 
created  faculties.  The  sufficient  consola- 
tion must  be  that  which  satisfies  both  his 
mind  and  his  heart.  It  must  bring  comfort 
not  by  the  denial  of  his  reason,  but  through 
his  reason.  It  must  soothe  not  by  the  ob- 
[103] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


literation  of  his  memory,  but  by  the  very 
use  of  his  memory. 

The  offer  of  consolation  through  reason 
and  through  memory  is  the  offer  contained 
in  Christ's  promise  of  the  "Comforter." 
The  "Comforter"  was  to  be  the  Teacher. 
This  is  the  consolation  offered  to  sorrowing 
men  available  through  their  reason.  And 
the  "Comforter"  was  to  "bring  to  remem- 
brance all  things,"  whatsoever  He  had  said 
unto  them.  This  is  the  consolation  offered 
to  sorrowing  men  available  through  their 
memory. 

A  great  deal  of  valuable  time  has  been 
wasted  by  theologians  in  their  discussion  of 
the  nature  and  of  the  office  of  this  "Com- 
forter." But  stripped  of  all  its  theological 
terminology  and  of  its  mystical  significance, 
Christ's  offer  to  sorrowing  men  is  simply  the 
offer  to  them  of  the  continuance  in  sorrow 
of  a  reasonable  faith  and  of  a  dauntless 
trust. 

Some  of  the  specific  things  which  Jesus 
had  said  to  His  disciples  and  of  which  the 
promised  "Comforter"  was  to  remind  them 
[104] 


SUFFICIENT   CONSOLATION 


were  these.  He  had  told  them  that  God 
cared  even  for  the  sparrows,  and  that  they 
were  of  more  worth  in  God's  sight  than 
many  sparrows.  He  had  told  them  that  the 
Father  was  more  willing  to  give  them  bless- 
ings than  they  were  willing  to  ask.  He 
had  declared  that  it  was  not  the  will  of  the 
Father  that  anj^one  should  perish.  But 
also  He  had  told  them  that  in  this  world 
they  should  have  tribulation.  By  His  own 
example,  more  forcibly  than  He  could  pos- 
sibly have  shown  them  by  mere  words.  He 
had  made  it  quite  clear  to  them  that  love  in 
a  sinful  world  must  suffer,  and  that  obedi- 
ence to  the  will  of  the  loving  God  is  not  al- 
ways easy. 

But  some  of  these  things,  perhaps  all  of 
these  things,  Jesus  evidently  thought  His 
disciples  might  forget  unless  they  had  a  re- 
minder. Let  us  repeat.  The  "Comforter" 
is  the  divine  reminder  to  men  of  the  truths 
spoken  and  lived  by  Jesus,  the  basal  truths 
of  faith  and  of  trust. 

In   the   dark   it   is   not   always   easy   to 
remember    the    truths    which    have    been 
[105] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


learned  in  the  light.  When  a  human 
father  has  proven  his  love  for  his  child 
by  many  blessings  of  which  the  child  is 
conscious,  there  may  come  a  time  when  the 
blessing  is  hidden  from  the  child's  under- 
standing. The  way,  then,  is  dark  to  the 
child.  The  loving  face  of  the  father  is 
temporarily  hidden.  But  in  the  natural 
fear  of  his  loneliness  let  the  child  hear  the 
voice  of  his  father.  It  will  be  the  voice  of 
reassurance  coming  to  him  in  the  darkness. 
It  will  be  the  tender  reminder  of  the  father's 
proven  love.  It  will  be  the  sweet  assurance 
that  that  love  cannot  fail. 

This  is  the  "Comforter"  promised  by 
Jesus  to  sorrowing  souls.  The  "Comforter" 
is  the  voice  of  God  speaking  to  men  in  the 
dark,  bidding  them  to  remember  His  unfail- 
ing goodness  in  the  past,  and  reasonably  to 
trust  Him  now  that  they  cannot  see. 

How  different  this  consolation  promised 
by  Jesus  from  the  consolation  of  the  per- 
secuted servant  of  Jehovah  in  the  poem  of 
Job!  Job  said,  "Though  He  slay  me,  yet 
will  I  trust  in  Him."  The  consoled  Chris- 
[106] 


SUFFICIENT   CONSOLATION 


tian  says,  "Because  He  loves  me  I  know  He 
cannot  slay  me."  "I  know  in  whom  I  have 
believed,  and  am  persuaded  that  He  is  able 
to  keep  that  which  I  have  committed  unto 
Him." 

And  how  different  this  consolation  from 
the  hoped-for  consolation  of  absorption  in 
self-indulgence  or  even  in  work  and  in  serv- 
ice !  The  man  who  tries  to  deaden  his  sensi- 
bility to  suffering  says,  "I  must  forget." 
The  Christian  consoled  by  the  divine  re- 
minder of  God's  love  says,  "I  need  not  try 
to  forget,  for  I  can  trust."  He  who  tries 
to  deaden  his  sorrow  by  forgetfulness,  al- 
ways becomes  doubly  bereaved.  He  is  be- 
reaved not  only  in  the  present,  but  he  is 
bereaved  of  the  sweetness  of  the  past.  But 
he  who  has  found  consolation  in  a  reasonable 
trust,  finds  the  sweet  and  painful  memories 
themselves  added  inducements  to  that  trust. 
How  can  the  remembered,  precious  moments 
of  soul  communion  eternally  cease?  How, 
if  God  is  love?  The  answer  is  this.  Be- 
cause God  is  love,  the  precious  experiences 
cannot  cease,  the  soul  communion  cannot 
[107] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


stoj^.  The  continuance  of  the  memory  of 
the  past  is,  after  all,  the  promise  of  the 
fruitfulness  of  the  hope  for  the  future. 
He  who  has  blest  us  cannot  really  discon- 
tinue His  blessings,  for  He  is  changeless 
love.  So  though  for  a  moment  the  way  may 
be  dark,  reminded  by  the  "Comforter,"  in 
reason  and  in  sweet  memory  we  can  still 
trust  and  hope. 

"  I  know  not  where  His  islands  lift 
Their  fronded  palms  in  air, 
I  only  know  I  cannot  drift 
Beyond  His  love  and  care." 


[108] 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 


CHAPTER     SEVEN 


"  My  grace  is  sufficient  for  thee;  for  my  strength  is  made 
perfect  in  weakness." — 2  Corinthians  12:  9. 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 

When  "Christian"  in  Bunyan's  immortal 
allegory  started  from  the  City  of  Destruc- 
tion, he  bore  upon  his  back  a  heavy  burden. 
At  first  the  purpose  of  the  pilgrim's  flight 
was  but  to  rid  himself  of  the  burden  which 
no  man  in  his  own  city  could  loosen.  The 
burden  remained,  however,  until,  on  his  way 
to  Mount  Zion,  he  came  to  the  cross  and  the 
tomb.  There,  at  the  foot  of  the  cross,  the 
burden  loosed  itself.  It  rolled  into  the 
tomb  and  was  seen  no  more. 

But  by  this  time  the  purpose  of  "Chris- 
tian's" journey  had  become  more  clearly  de- 
fined. The  removal  of  the  burden  proved 
to  be,  after  all,  not  an  end  in  itself,  but 
only  a  means  to  an  end.  It  made  the  pil- 
grim free  not  to  lie  down  and  rest,  but  to 
run  forward  with  increased  buoyancy  to- 
ward the  Celestial  City. 

There  are  many  burdens  incident  to  the 
busy  life  of  this  twentieth  century  of  which 
John  Bunyan  made  no  account.     The  bur- 

[111] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


dens  upon  the  backs  of  the  Christians,  in 
this  age  of  competition  and  of  conflict,  are 
social  in  their  nature  as  well  as  personal. 
They  exist  not  only  because  every  man  is 
responsible  to  God,  but  also  because  every 
man  is  a  part  of  the  social  order,  and  be- 
cause no  man,  in  justice  to  his  friends,  his 
neighbours,  his  country,  and  his  God,  can 
escape  from  the  City  of  Destruction  just  to 
save  his  own  soul.  He  must  live  in  the  city 
wherein  he  was  born.  He  must  dwell  amid 
the  earthly  conditions  that  surround  him, 
and  so  long  as  he  remains  upon  the  earth 
an  earthly  burden  must  be  bound  upon  his 
back. 

But  surely  this  burden  with  its  included 
social  significance  can  be  of  no  less  concern 
to  the  God  of  love  than  "Christian's"  bur- 
den of  the  weight  only  of  his  own  sins. 
Somewhere  on  the  hard  road  of  ministry 
that  leads  to  the  Mount  Zion  of  the  earthly 
Kingdom  of  God,  somewhere  there  must 
still  be  the  place  of  the  cross  and  the  tomb 
where  the  burden  shall  be  lightened. 

But  where  shall  the  modern  Christian  find 

[  112  ] 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 


relief  from  his  burden?  Obviously,  our  an- 
swer to  this  question  must  depend  upon  our 
conception  of  the  nature  of  the  desired  re- 
lief. 

There  are  two  ways  by  which  the  oppres- 
siveness of  any  burden  may  be  lightened. 
There  is  the  method  of  subtraction,  the  de- 
crease of  the  load  itself;  and  there  is  the 
method  of  addition,  the  increase  of  the 
strength  to  bear  the  load. 

When  the  former  method  has  been  ex- 
clusively pursued  by  Christians  in  the  at- 
tempt only  to  decrease  the  weight  of  the  bur- 
den, it  has  always  ended  disastrously.  The 
result  of  this  method  is  weakness  and  inef- 
ficiency. If  a  child  is  relieved  of  all  re- 
sponsibility by  his  over-indulgent  parents, 
the  child  will  never,  in  any  real  sense  of  the 
word,  become  mature.  If  he  is  never 
compelled  to  fight  his  own  battles  against 
temptation,  if  he  is  never  obliged  to  make 
a  choice  for  himself,  if  he  never  knows  dis- 
appointment and  grief,  and  if  he  is  never 
urged  to  make  the  sacrifice  of  unselfishness, 
this  child  indeed  finds  relief  from  some  of 
[113] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


the  burdens  of  life,  but  the  cost  of  the  relief 
by  this  process  of  subtraction  is  the  very 
usefulness  of  his  life. 

Thus  it  is  only  at  the  cost  of  their  useful- 
ness that  men  in  religion  seek  to  rid  them- 
selves of  the  burdens  of  conflicts  and  of 
choices  and  of  sacrifices.  That  period  of 
Christian  history  which  was  dominated  by 
Christians'  refusal  to  bear  the  burdens  of  a 
social  life  with  their  fellow-men,  was  a 
period  of  personal  piety  at  the  expense  of 
social  helpfulness.  If  all  Christians,  like 
the  monks  of  the  Middle  Ages,  had  sought 
relief  from  social  burdens  by  the  selfish  proc- 
ess of  their  entrance  into  monasteries,  no 
Christian  would  have  grown  to  maturity  of 
influence  and  of  efliciency,  and  the  world 
outside  the  monasteries  would  constantly 
have  sunk  lower  into  the  depths  of  licen- 
tiousness and  cruelty. 

Let  the  selfish  Christian  who  seeks  only 
to  be  rid  of  his  burden  be  clearly  described. 
He  is  the  one  who  seeks  relief  from  the  ob- 
ligations of  his  God-created  personality. 
lie  may  seek  the  relief  from  God  Himself. 
[114] 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 


Perhaps  instead  of  depending  upon  his  own 
volition  he  may  expect  God,  by  a  special 
revelation,  to  relieve  him  of  the  necessity 
of  choice.  It  may  be  that  instead  of 
developing  his  own  power  of  resistance 
to  evil  he  may  expect  a  miracle  of  God 
to  furnish  him  with  the  requisite  power  to 
resist  in  time  of  need.  It  is  possible  that 
without  the  trouble  and  anxiety  and  the 
sacrifice  of  his  own  love  he  may  expect  God 
to  guide  and  to  guard  his  relatives  and  his 
friends.  It  is  even  conceivable  that  he  may 
be  like  the  "Christian"  of  Bunyan's  imag- 
ination, so  intensely  interested  in  the  salva- 
tion of  his  own  soul  that  he  may  expect  God 
to  save  everybody  else  without  his  heart- 
burdened  assistance.  This  is  the  man  who 
"casts  his  burdens  upon  the  Lord"  with 
startling  literalness.  The  inevitable  effect 
of  such  an  unwarranted,  literal  interpreta- 
tion of  the  Scriptural  command  is  his  dis- 
obedience to  that  other  command,  "Let  every 
man  bear  his  own  burden."  And  the  dis- 
obedience creates  inefficiency  and  destroys 
personality. 

[115] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


Or  this  selfish  Christian  who  seeks  only 
to  be  rid  of  his  burden  of  personal  and 
social  obligations  may  be  he  who  tries  to 
find  relief  from  his  fellow-men.  Some 
people,  for  instance,  are  prone  to  throw  the 
burden  of  their  own  sins  upon  their  an- 
cestors. They  have  inherited  weaknesses 
which,  they  think,  relieve  them  of  the  bur- 
den of  personal  blameworthiness.  Or  it 
may  be  the  conditions  of  society  are  held  re- 
sponsible for  their  wrongdoing.  Environ- 
ment has  made  them  bad.  Many  people, 
too,  are  wont  to  throw  the  burden  of  their 
responsibility  for  others  upon  the  teacher 
who  trains  their  children,  upon  the  Church 
that  is  supposed  to  care  for  the  spiritual 
concerns  of  their  neighbours,  upon  the 
preacher,  the  social  reformer,  and  the  phi- 
lanthropist. "It  is  the  business  of  other 
men  to  promote  the  welfare  of  my  family 
and  my  community,"  these  declare.  "I  pay 
others  for  this  work.  It  is  my  business  only 
to  take  care  of  myself." 

It  is  sad  to  admit  that  even  professing 
Christians  are  guilty  of  this  attempted  eva- 
[116] 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 


sion  of  the  burden,  both  of  personal  and 
of  social  responsibility.  "They  have  their 
reward."  There  are  some  of  the  burdens  of 
a  sensitive  conscience  and  of  a  grieved  love 
which  these  do  not  bear.  But  for  this  im- 
munity they  pay  the  tremendous  price  of  a 
hardened  conscience  and  of  a  calloused  heart. 
They  are  rid  of  the  burden  only  at  the  ex- 
pense of  their  very  manhood  and  woman- 
hood. And  upon  all  of  these  who  attempt 
to  get  rid  of  the  burden  of  responsibility 
there  falls  always  the  heavier  and  more  op- 
pressive burden  of  inefficiency. 

The  fact  is  that  in  life  as  we  know  it  there 
are  some  burdens  that  are  absolutely  neces- 
sary. All  of  these  necessary  and  irremov- 
able burdens  are  reducible  to  one  general 
class.  They  are  the  burdens  of  love.  Per- 
haps a  complete  enumeration  of  the  love- 
burdens  would  be  impossible.  A  few  sug- 
gestions, however,  will  suffice  for  their  rec- 
ognition. 

The  burden  of  right  living  is  a  love-bur- 
den. In  this  world  all  the  children  of  God 
are  burdened  with  the  responsibility  for  pu- 

[117] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


rity  and  righteousness,  both  of  thought  and 
of  conduct,  not  because  they  are  in  this 
world  to  save  themselves  for  another,  but  be- 
cause here  they  must  order  their  own  lives  in 
the  way  that  shall  best  help  those  whom  they 
love. 

The  burden  of  sorrow  for  wrongdoing  is 
a  love-burden,  for  wrongdoing  is  an  eva- 
sion of  one  of  the  responsibilities  of  love. 
It  cannot  be  possible  for  the  burden  of  the 
sorrow  for  sin  to  be  wholly  removed  so  long 
as  the  sinner  is  blessed  by  God  with  the 
power  of  memory  and  with  the  more  divine 
power  of  love.  It  would  not  be  well  if  the 
burden  could  be  removed.  The  cross  and 
the  tomb  of  Christ  mean  to  the  Christian 
not  the  place  where  the  sorrow  of  the  sin  is 
rolled  away,  but  where  the  strength  to  bear 
even  this  burden  is  imparted  by  the  merciful 
forgiveness  of  God. 

The  burden  of  the  service  of  others  is  an 
irremovable  love-burden.  And  this  burden 
includes  all  the  lesser  burdens  of  grief  and 
of  sympathy,  of  disappointment  and  of 
patience.  For  the  wrongs  of  those  we  love 
[118] 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 


we  must  always  grieve.  In  their  sorrows 
we,  too,  must  sorrow.  Because  of  their 
failures,  we  also  must  be  disappointed. 
With  their  willfulness  we  must  be  patient. 
It  is  true  for  the  Christian  as  well  as  for 
Christ  Himself  that  there  is  the  cup  of  love's 
sacrifice  which  cannot  pass  away,  and  so  for 
the  love-burdened  Christian  there  always 
will  be  the  agony  of  Gethsemane  and  the 
sacrifice  of  Calvary. 

But  there  are  many  burdens  which  are 
absolutely  unnecessary.  These  unnecessary 
burdens  may  all  be  included  under  the  gen- 
eral head  of  burdens  of  fear. 

The  burden  of  the  distrust  of  God's  for- 
giveness is  an  unnecessary  fear-burden. 
Though  the  sinful  man  of  God-endowed 
conscience  cannot  reasonably  hope  or  really 
wish  to  be  relieved  of  the  burden  of  the  sor- 
row for  sin,  he  can  and  should  be  relieved 
of  the  burden  of  the  fear  of  sin's  conse- 
quence. The  former  burden  can  be  borne 
by  him  who  is  strengthened  by  God;  the  lat- 
ter can  be  removed  from  him  who  really 
trusts  in  God. 

1 119  ] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


Worry  of  any  kind  is  an  unnecessary  fear- 
burden.  Worry  is  the  over-anxiety  created 
by  distrust.  It  is  begotten  of  the  fear  of 
what  is  going  to  happen  to-morrow  either 
to  ourselves  or  to  others.  This  burden  men 
bind  upon  their  own  backs,  and  the  weight 
of  this  removable  and  self-inflicted  burden 
is  bearing  many  of  the  professed  followers 
of  the  trustful  Jesus  to  the  very  ground. 

Here  in  connection  with  these  removable 
burdens  is  where  we  must  interpret  literally 
the  command  to  cast  our  burdens  upon  the 
Lord.  The  command  means  not  that  we 
are  to  throw  away  our  self-reliance,  but  just 
to  throw  away  our  fear.  We  can  be  rid 
of  all  of  the  self-inflicted  fear-burdens  by 
the  way  of  trust. 

From  the  preceding  resume  of  the  difl*er- 
ent  kinds  of  burdens  we  deduce  this  general 
statement  of  the  burdened  condition  of  all 
of  God's  children.  They  all  must  bear  the 
God-entrusted  burdens  of  love;  none  need  to 
bear  the  added  self-inflicted  burdens  of  fear. 
The  strength  that  can  sustain  the  burdened 
children  of  God  is  the  strength  that  sup- 
[  120  ] 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 


ports  the  love  and  destroys  the  fear. 
Greater  love  and  less  fear,  these  are  what 
we  all  need. 

The  supply  of  these  needs  of  all  men  is 
promised  in  the  religion  of  Jesus  Christ.  In 
the  words  of  the  Apostle  Paul  to  the  Church 
at  Corinth,  the  twofold  assurance  of  the 
Christian  religion  is  concisely  stated.  "My 
grace  is  sufficient  for  you,  for  My  strength 
is  made  perfect  in  weakness."  Sufficient 
grace!     Divine  strength! 

His  grace  is  sufficient.  The  religion  of 
Jesus  brings  us  into  filial  relations  wdth  the 
Father  who  is  gracious.  The  complete 
idea  of  God's  graciousness  includes  not  only 
His  mercy  and  His  forgiveness,  but  His 
care  and  His  protection.  Ever  ready  is  He 
to  forgive  our  repented  sins,  and  ever  watch- 
ful is  He  over  our  best  interests  and  the 
interests  of  our  friends  and  loved  ones.  If 
we  really  trust  the  love  of  our  Father,  all  our 
fear-burdens  will  roll  away.  At  the  foot 
of  the  cross  of  Christ's  sacrifice,  if  the  cross 
means  to  us  all  that  it  should,  our  trust  in  the 
Father  who  so  loves  us  will  take  away  all 
[121] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


those  burdens  which  we  needlessly  pile  upon 
ourselves.     His  grace  is  sufficient. 

And  His  strength  perfects  our  weakness. 
The  appeal  of  Christ's  cross  is  not  only  an 
appeal  to  trust,  but  an  appeal  to  love.  As 
He  has  loved  us,  so  we  are  to  love  one 
another.  In  fellowship  with  the  spirit  of 
His  love,  the  love-burdens  will  not  grow  less, 
but  we  shall  grow  stronger.  It  is  only  when 
our  love  falters  that  these  burdens  seem  un- 
bearable. When  we  take  His  yoke  upon 
us  and  learn  of  Him,  we  become  united  with 
the  strength  that  enables  us  to  bear.  His 
strength  makes  perfect  our  weakness. 

But  after  all,  the  end  of  our  pilgrimage 
through  life  is  neither  the  removal  nor  the 
lightening  of  our  burdens.  When  at  the 
place  of  the  cross,  where  our  trust  is  re- 
newed and  our  strength  increased,  we  see 
so  many  of  the  burdens  roll  away,  and  find 
those  remaining  so  much  easier  to  be  borne, 
then  we  are  to  remember  that  the  lessening 
of  the  load  is  but  to  increase  the  buoyancy 
of  our  onward  journey  in  the  path  of  serv- 
ice. We  have  come  to  interpret  the  Celes- 
[122] 


SUSTAINING  STRENGTH 


tial  City  as  the  Kingdom  of  God  upon  the 
earth.  We  seek,  it  may  be,  not  so  much  the 
heavenly  city  of  bliss  as  the  earthly  city  of 
righteousness  and  of  justice  and  of  brotherly 
love.  The  way  we  travel  is  not  the  way  of 
mere  personal  salvation  so  much  as  the  way 
of  social  service.  But  this  way,  too,  has  its 
Slough  of  Despond,  its  Hill  Difficulty,  its 
menacing  ApoUyon,  and  its  threatening 
lions  by  the  way.  We  crave  not  the 
ease  from  our  burdens  which  will  enable 
us  to  rest  in  idleness,  but  that  buoyant 
strength  and  that  lightness  of  burden  which 
shall  enable  us  to  press  onward,  conquering 
and  to  conquer,  serving  and  to  serve. 

The  grace  and  the  strength  offered  in  the 
religion  of  Jesus  will  not  be  sufficient  ex- 
cept for  those  who  are  determined  to  use 
that  grace  and  strength  in  the  continued 
service  of  their  fellow-men  and  of  God. 
The  place  of  the  cross  and  the  tomb  of 
Christ  must  be  to  us  all  the  place  of  re- 
newed consecration. 


[123] 


SATISFYING    JOY 


CHAPTER    EIGHT 


Your  joy  no  one  taketh  away  from  you." — John  16:  22. 


SATISFYING  JOY 

The  right  of  all  men  to  the  pursuit  of  hap- 
piness was  not  granted  by  the  Constitution 
of  the  United  States.  It  is  a  right  granted  to 
them  by  their  divine  birthright.  All  that 
constitutions  and  laws  can  do  is  to  seek  to 
protect  the  right.  Exactly  as  all  men  in 
God's  world  have  the  right  to  eat  and  to 
sleep,  so  they  have  the  right  to  be  happy, 
and  for  much  the  same  reason.  They  have 
the  right  to  eat  and  to  sleep  because  their 
physical  natures  demand  sustenance  and 
refreshment.  They  have  the  right  to  be 
happy  because  their  spiritual  natures  de- 
mand sustenance  and  refreshment.  The 
appetite  for  happiness  is  as  normal  a  char- 
acteristic of  the  human  being  as  the  appetite 
for  food,  and  both  appetites  are  God- 
created. 

But  it  is  the  tritest  of  all  trite  truths  that 
the  appetite  for  happiness  is  not  universally 
satisfied.    There  are  many  of  God's  children 
[127] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


who  experience  very  little  of  the  fullness  of 
joy;  perhaps  there  are  some  who  know  noth- 
ing at  all  of  such  fullness ;  probably  there  is 
no  one  who  has  ever  been  completely  filled. 
Here  is  one  of  the  many  apparent  contradic- 
tions between  what  should  be  and  what  is. 
According  to  the  plan  of  the  Creator,  re- 
vealed in  men's  inherent  appetite  for  happi- 
ness, all  men  should  be  happy.  Because  of 
existing  conditions,  both  within  themselves 
and  without  themselves,  they  all  fail  in  the 
attainment  of  that  right. 

So  prevalent,  indeed,  is  the  unhappiness, 
and  so  inevitable  does  the  unhappiness  seem 
that  some  pagan  thinkers  have  found  the 
chief  end  in  life  to  lie  not  merely  in  the  sub- 
jugation of  all  desires,  but  in  the  very  anni- 
hilation of  them.  While  even  some  Chris- 
tian thinkers,  and  these  not  all  of  mediaeval 
days,  have  been  able  to  offer  to  men  only  the 
ex]3ected  joy  of  an  anticipated  future  life 
to  reconcile  them  to  the  inexplicable  misery 
of  the  present  life. 

The  contention  is  here  made  that  the  sub- 
stitution of  a  promised  future  happiness  for 
[128] 


SATISFYING  JOY 


a  demanded  present  happiness  is  a  confes- 
sion of  the  inefficiency  of  Christ's  religion, 
and  is  in  fact  an  evasion  of  Christian  re- 
sponsibihty.  If  men  cannot  find  satisfying 
joy  now,  they  cannot  reasonably  expect 
any  satisfying  joy  by  and  by.  If  God  in 
this  world  has  been  so  overcome  by  any 
spirit  of  evil  that  He  cannot  here  make  His 
children  happy,  we  have  no  ground  for  be- 
lieving that  He  will  be  any  more  powerful 
in  any  world  to  come.  If  God  in  this 
world,  which  is  admittedly  His,  will  not 
make  His  children  happy  now,  we  cannot 
credit  any  greater  willingness  on  His  part 
for  the  future  existence.  There  cannot  be 
two  Gods — one  to  rule  upon  the  earth,  and 
one  to  rule  in  Heaven — and  it  is  high  time 
that  Christian  people  should  cease  talking 
and  acting  as  though  they  believed  such  an 
absurdity. 

Is  there  joy  in  the  religion  of  Jesus  Christ 
which  can  satisfy  those  who  have  the  God- 
given  riglit  to  the  pursuit  of  happiness  in 
this  world  as  we  know  it  to-day — this  world 
of  sorrow  and  of  suffering  and  of  sin? 
9  [  129  ] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


That  is  one  of  the  most  persistent  questions 
which  concern  the  efficiency  of  the  Christian 
religion.  Countless  multitudes  are  await- 
ing the  answer,  multitudes  of  the  miserable 
and  the  disappointed  and  the  disheartened 
children  of  God.  They  stand  before  us 
with  bent  bodies,  with  careworn  faces,  their 
eyes  wet  with  tears  or  hardened  with  hope- 
lessness, and  with  uplifted,  pleading  hands 
they  cry,  "Give  us  the  joy  that  no  man  can 
take  away  from  us."  And  what  shall  be 
the  Christian's  answer  to  these  souls  plead- 
ing only  for  what  is  theirs  by  divine  birth- 
right? 

Let  the  answer  to  this  demand  of  unhappy 
souls  be  spoken  in  the  words  of  no  other 
than  the  Master  Himself.  "Your  joy  will 
be  full,"  He  said  to  His  disciples,  "when 
my  joy  is  in  you." 

His  joy!  What  did  Jesus  mean?  Tra- 
dition has  appropriated  the  words  of  the 
Second  Isaiah  as  descriptive  of  this  Saviour 
of  the  world,  "A  Man  of  sorrows  and  ac- 
quainted with  grief."  Christian  art  has 
painted  the  Christ  with  sad,  unsmiling  face. 
[130] 


SATISFYING  JOY 


But  Jesus  pictured  Himself  as  the  Man  of 
Joy.  He  spoke  of  that  joy  as  something 
so  real,  so  abiding,  so  satisfying  that  the 
possession  of  it  by  others  could  be  described 
only  as  the  very  fullness  of  joy.  Whence 
the  apparent  discrepancy? 

A  casual  review  of  the  biography  of 
Jesus  would  seem  to  indicate  that  tradition 
and  art  had  been  right  in  their  picture  of  the 
Man  of  Sorrows.  We  read  that  He  was 
born  of  poor  parents  and  that  He  had  not 
where  to  lay  His  head ;  that  He  was  tempted 
in  the  wilderness  and  tried  in  the  garden  of 
Gethsemane ;  that  His  body  was  wearied  by 
His  ceaseless  ministry,  and  that  His  soul 
was  sickened  by  men's  hardness  of  heart; 
that  He  was  betrayed  by  one  of  His  house- 
hold of  disciples,  denied  with  oaths  by  an- 
other, and  deserted  by  them  all ;  that  He  was 
made  the  butt  of  the  cruel  horseplay  of 
rough  soldiers;  that  He  was  crucified  in  the 
company  of  criminals;  and  that  even  in  the 
agony  of  His  dying  hours  His  countrymen 
for  whom  His  loving  heart  yearned,  passed 
by  the  foot  of  the  cross,  wagging  their  heads 
[  131  ] 


EFFICIENT  KELIGION 


and  reviling  Him.  Surely  if  any  man  was 
ever  acquainted  with  grief  it  was  this  lonely, 
rejected,  crucified  Son  of  Man. 

But  delve  deeper  into  the  biography  of 
the  Saviour.  Read  between  the  lines.  Find 
the  spirit  that  sustained  Him.  Study  this 
life  not  as  it  was  seen  by  others,  but  as  it 
was  experienced  by  Himself.  When  we 
try  to  catch  something  of  the  deep,  spiritual 
significance  of  that  life,  we  read  something 
like  this.  He  was  born  of  good  parents  who 
loved  Him.  He  became  early  conscious  of 
His  filial  relations  with  the  eternal  God. 
He  resisted  the  temptation  in  the  wilderness 
and  overcame  the  weakness  in  Gethsemane. 
He  knew  the  inner  spirit  of  willingness  of 
those  who  were  weak  in  the  flesh  and  slow  of 
understanding.  He  made  the  maimed  to 
M^alk  and  the  blind  to  see,  and  to  the  sinful 
He  gave  hope  and  courage.  He  was  con- 
scious of  the  remorse  of  Judas,  the  quick 
penitence  of  Peter,  and  He  could  hope  for 
the  restoration  of  the  faith  of  those  disciples 
who  for  a  time  had  distrusted  and  deserted 
Him.  No  mockery  of  homage  could  de- 
[132] 


SATISFYING  JOY 


stroy  within  Him  the  sense  of  the  worthiness 
of  real  homage,  and  the  cross  on  Calvary- 
was  to  Him  but  the  place  where  He  could 
happily  say  that  His  work,  the  faithful 
performance  of  God's  will,  was  finished. 
Surely  no  man  had  ever  such  cause  for  joy 
as  this  Son  of  God  who  had  overcome  temp- 
tation in  Himself,  who  had  served  and  saved 
His  fellow-men,  and  who  had  finished  the 
work  God  had  given  Him  to  do. 

This  brief  review  of  the  life  of  the  Man 
for  whom  joy  was  a  real  possession  in  spite 
of  His  acquaintance  with  grief,  suggests  to 
us  that  the  real  and  lasting  joy  of  life  is 
something  independent  of  all  outside  con- 
ditions. 

If  we  should  limit  the  use  of  the  word 
"happiness"  to  its  derivative  significance, 
and  define  the  word  as  the  pleasure  derived 
from  favourable  happenings,  then  we  must 
admit  that  the  religion  of  this  Man  promises 
happiness  to  His  followers  only  incidentally. 
Primarily,  Christ's  religion  cannot  be  ex- 
pected to  smooth  the  waters  of  the  troublous 
sea  of  hfe.  But  it  does  something  more 
[133] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


and  better  than  this.  It  suppHes  the  bal- 
last which  enables  one  to  sail  serenely- 
through  the  troubled  seas. 

When  we  take  "joy"  from  its  derivation 
to  signify  an  exultant  leaping  forth  of  the 
spirit,  and  when  we  modify  the  word  with 
due  reference  to  Christ's  own  joy  by  the 
adjective  Christian,  we  have  for  our  defini- 
tion of  Christian  joy  the  following:  Chris- 
tian joy  is  the  Christlike  consciousness  of 
victory  over  self,  of  service  for  others,  and 
of  harmony  with  the  will  of  God.  The  pos- 
session of  such  joy  will  not  make  the  sea  of 
life  all  smooth,  but  it  will  make  all  the  angry 
waves  surmountable.  It  will  create  the  hap- 
piness of  external  conditions  not  so  much  by 
ameliorating  the  unfavourable  conditions, 
as  by  minimizing  their  untoward  influence. 

It  is  pitiably  true  that  many  men,  per- 
haps most  men,  are  pursuing  happiness  by 
the  futile  method  of  the  attempt  to  smooth 
the  sea.  They  demand  that  the  conditions 
shall  be  made  favourable  for  them.  They 
expect  ease  and  luxury  and  idleness.  The 
true  Christian  method  of  the  pursuit  of  hap- 
[134] 


SATISFYING  JOY 


piness  is  the  method  of  overcoming  the 
roughness  of  the  sea  by  an  increase  of  bal- 
last. If  the  tempestuous  waves  of  sorrow 
and  of  disappointment  are  in  danger  of 
overwhelming  one,  the  sure  way  to  decrease 
their  violence  is  to  increase  one's  own  stabil- 
ity. It  is  only  the  small,  unballasted  craft 
that  feels  the  high  seas  and  the  adverse 
winds.  The  great,  heavily  ballasted  ocean 
liners  are  unmoved  by  the  sea's  roughness. 

The  only  joy  that  can  really  satisfy  is 
this  joy  of  the  greatness  of  personality. 
The  three  elements  in  the  attainment  of  such 
greatness  are  the  elements  of  victory  over 
one's  self,  of  service  for  others,  and  of  obe- 
dience to  God.  This  is  the  trinity  of  joy — 
the  joy  of  self-mastery,  the  joy  of  brotherly 
love,  and  the  joy  of  filial  obedience.  And 
this  is  the  Christian  joy,  for  this  was  the 
joy  of  Christ. 

If  we  are  forced  to  admit  that  only  Christ 
Himself  ever  perfectly  attained  the  great- 
ness of  personality  which  alone  could  make 
His  joy  full,  we  must  yet  declare  that  the 
approach  to  the  fullness  of  joy  is  by  the  one 
[135] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


way  of  this  Victor's  attainment.  We  must 
understand  that  when  Jesus  expressed  His 
wish  that  His  joy  might  be  in  His  disciples, 
He  was  wishing  for  them  the  same  kind  of 
a  hfe  of  self-mastery,  of  service,  and  of 
obedience  which  He  Himself  had  lived. 

So  when  these  multitudes  of  God's  chil- 
dren, who  by  the  divine  right  of  their  in- 
heritance should  be  happy,  but  who  are  not, 
come  to  the  Christian  teacher  with  stream- 
ing eyes  and  trembling  lips,  asking  for  the 
joy  that  satisfies,  this  must  be  the  Christian's 
answer:  "Such  joy,  dear  suffering,  disap- 
pointed friend,  you  can  have  if  you  will 
seek  it  in  the  right  direction."  Has  your 
unhappiness  come  as  the  inevitable  result  of 
sinful  indulgence?  Your  joy  will  be  re- 
stored when  with  God's  promised  help  you 
have  overcome  the  temptation  and  mastered 
yourself.  Has  your  unhappiness  come  as 
the  result  of  selfishness?  You  will  find 
joy  again  by  the  way  of  the  helpful 
service  of  love.  Are  your  eyes  wet  with 
tears  because  of  disappointment  and  of 
bereavement?  Ah,  here  is  the  promise  of 
[136] 


SATISFYING  JOY 


the  joy  that  can  sustain  even  in  these  un- 
toward and  humanly  inexphcable  conditions. 
It  Hes  in  trustful  obedience  to  the  will  of  the 
Father,  who  knows  and  who  cares. 

But  when  all  is  said  to  the  unhappy  soul 
that  the  Christian  can  say,  there  wdll  be  a 
remainder  of  inexplicable  and  seemingly  ir- 
removable unhappiness,  so  long  as  the  life 
of  each  individual  is  closely  associated  with 
the  lives  of  all  other  individuals,  and  so  long 
as  there  remain  in  the  world  some  children 
of  God  who  do  not  try  to  overcome  their 
sins  and  their  selfishness,  and  who  are  not 
endeavouring  to  fulfill  in  themselves  the  will 
of  God  for  them.  Vicarious  unhappiness! 
The  world  seems  full  of  it.  Unhappy  par- 
ents, unhappy  husbands  and  wives,  unhappy 
children,  unhappy  friends,  sorrowing,  griev- 
ing, suffering  for  the  sins  and  selfishness 
and  wilfulness  of  others.  Can  the  religion 
of  Jesus  remove  this  unhappiness?  Only 
by  the  way  of  a  Calvary.  Like  Jesus 
Christ  Himself,  no  follower  of  Jesus  in  this 
world  of  ignorance  and  of  selfishness  and  of 
sin  can  expect  to  be  other  than  "acquainted 

[137] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


with  grief."  But  like  Jesus,  every  Chris- 
tian who  is  strong  enough  to  take  up  his  own 
cross  can  find,  aye,  will  find,  joy  in  the  very 
suffering  of  sacrifice. 

Here,  then,  is  the  satisfying  joy  offered 
to  men  by  fellowship  with  the  spirit  of  Jesus 
Christ,  the  joy  of  self-mastery,  the  joy 
of  loving  service,  the  joy  of  the  fullfilment 
of  God's  will.  That  was  the  joy  of  Christ. 
That  is  the  joy  of  every  one  who  is  truly 
trying  to  follow  Jesus.  That  can  be  the 
joy  of  all  who  will  fight  and  serve  and  obey. 


[138] 


ATTAINABLE   PEACE 


CHAPTER    NINE 


"  My  peace  I  leave  with  you,  my  peace  I  give  unto  you :  not 
as  the  world  giveth,  give  I  unto  you." — John  14  :  27. 


ATTAINABLE  PEACE 

No  THOUGHTFUL  student  of  the  life  of 
Jesus  can  fail  to  notice  the  apparent  contra- 
diction of  His  utterances  concerning  peace. 
At  one  time,  quite  early  in  His  ministry,  He 
distinctly  declares:  "I  came  not  to  send 
peace,  but  a  sword.  For  I  am  come  to  set 
a  man  at  variance  against  his  father,  and 
the  daughter  against  her  mother,  and  the 
daughter-in-law  against  her  mother-in-law; 
and  a  man's  foes  shall  be  they  of  his  own 
household."  (Matt.  10:  34-36.)  But  when 
we  turn  the  pages  of  the  narrative  to  the 
very  end  of  His  life,  we  find  in  the  last  ad- 
dress to  His  disciples  the  promise  of  this 
bequest:  "Peace  I  leave  with  you,  My  peace 
I  give  unto  you.  Not  as  the  world  giveth, 
give  I  unto  you."     (John  14:25.) 

There  are  several  ways  by  which  we  may 
seek  escape  from  the  difficulty  of  this  seem- 
ing contradiction.      We  may  say,  as  some 
[141] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


have  said,  that  the  same  word  is  used  in  its 
different  connections  with  very  different 
meanings,  that  the  peace  which  Jesus  de- 
nied to  be  the  result  of  His  ministry  is  the 
peace  of  an  outer  social  harmony,  and  that 
the  peace  which  He  bequeathed  His  disciples 
is  the  peace  of  an  inner  personal  repose. 
History  has  seemed  to  substantiate  the 
truth  that  the  religion  of  Jesus,  with  its  va- 
rious and  sometimes  antagonistic  interpreta- 
tions, has  not  always  tended  towards  social 
harmony.  At  the  same  time,  the  testimony 
of  the  saints  of  all  ages  has  been  to  the 
effect  that  their  faith  in  Christ  has  produced 
a  personal  and  an  indwelling  peace.  Thus 
Christians  who  have  been  cast  away  by  their 
family,  ostracized  by  their  friends,  and  ex- 
communicated by  the  Church,  have  gone 
jubilantly  to  their  martyrdom,  testifying  to 
the  possession  of  the  inner  peace.  While 
other  Christians,  fighting  not  only  against 
the  manifold  evil  of  the  world,  but  quarrel- 
ing with  their  very  brethren  in  Christ  over 
matters  of  theology  and  speculation,  from 
time  to  time  have  paused  in  their  wordy 
[142] 


ATTAINABLE   PEACE 


battles  and  their  disgraceful  squabbles  to 
speak  triumphantly  of  the  peace  of  God  in 
their  own  hearts.  Perhaps  Jesus  meant  that 
His  religion  could  bring  to  men  objectively 
only  conflict,  and  that  it  could  give  to  them 
peace  only  as  a  subjective  experience. 

Or  we  might  seek  to  reconcile  the  diverse 
statements  of  Jesus,  as  others  have  done,  by 
reference  to  the  different  times  when  the 
statements  were  uttered.  We  might  inter- 
pret Him  to  mean  that  the  beginning  of  the 
Christian  life  is  tempestuous,  that  its  con- 
tinuance in  this  world  of  trouble  and  of  sin 
must  be  with  combat,  and  that  peace  can 
come  only  at  the  very  end  of  life  as  we  know 
it  here.  There  are  doubtless  many  toiling, 
struggling,  troubled  Christians  who  in  this 
conception  try  to  content  themselves  with 
the  mere  hope  of  a  peace  that  shall  be  theirs 
when  they  are  ready  to  die. 

Each  of  these  explanations,  however,  de- 
stroys something  of  the  efficiency  of  the 
religion  of  Jesus.  Subjective  experiences 
may  be  more  valuable  to  their  possessor  than 
corresponding  objective  experiences,  but 
[143] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


they  certainly  are  not  of  great  value  to 
others.  It  surely  is  better  for  a  company 
of  men  to  dwell  together  in  harmony,  than 
it  is  for  each  member  of  a  quarreling  and 
disputing  company  to  be  possessed  of  a 
mere  subjective  equipoise.  And  unless  the 
religion  of  Jesus  can  stop  the  objective 
quarreling,  the  world,  as  a  whole,  will  be 
but  slightly  impressed  by  personal  testi- 
monies to  subjective  peace. 

Again,  the  efficiency  of  the  religion  of 
Jesus  is  immeasurably  decreased  by  any  and 
all  attempts  to  postpone  the  blessings  of 
that  religion  to  some  future  time.  It  has 
been  the  great  source  of  weakness  in  Christ's 
rehgion  that  for  nearly  twenty  centuries  the 
most  of  its  blessings  have  been  relegated  to 
an  eternal  future.  Really,  the  present  is  as 
much  a  part  of  eternity  as  any  future  can 
be.  Men  are  not  suddenly  changed  into 
immortal  beings  when  they  die,  or  when  they 
are  about  to  die;  they  were  all  created  im- 
mortal beings  when  they  were  born.  The 
present  belongs  to  God  as  well  as  the  fu- 
ture. And  unless  it  can  be  demonstrated 
[144] 


ATTAINABLE  PEACE 


that  there  is  an  inevitable  disconnection  be- 
tween God's  present  and  God's  future,  we 
must  necessarily  demand  a  present  as  well 
as  a  future  realization  of  the  peaceful  con- 
dition of  life  with  God.  We  may  not  rea- 
sonably demand  that  the  blessing  of  peace 
shall  be  as  fully  appreciated  now  as  we  hope 
it  may  be  by  and  by,  for  the  present  ap- 
preciation of  the  blessing  depends  upon  our 
mortal  limitations.  But  in  so  far  as  we,  in 
our  immaturity,  are  now  able  to  accept  the 
blessings  of  peace,  in  so  far  must  we  believe 
that  exactly  the  same  kind  of  peace  may  be 
ours  with  God  to-day  as  can  possibly  be 
ours  when  we  come  to  die,  or  even  after  we 
are  dead.  The  peace  of  the  God  who  is  the 
God  of  the  living,  must  be  a  present  peace. 
The  logic  of  this  course  of  reasoning  com- 
pels the  conclusion  that  the  apparent  dis- 
crepancy in  Christ's  teachings  concerning 
peace  is  due  only  to  the  different  degrees  of 
men's  acceptance  of  peace.  It  was  not 
Christ's  fault  that  the  immediate  result  of 
the  entrance  into  this  world  of  His  evangel 
should  be  conflict.  The  conflict  was  caused 
[  145  ] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


by  the  unwillingness,  or,  if  one  prefers,  the 
inability  of  men  to  receive  that  which  He 
was  offering  them.  There  is  nothing  that 
makes  a  company  of  angry,  quarreling  men 
more  angry  and  more  quarrelsome  still  than 
the  unsought  and  unwelcome  attempt  to 
pacify  them.  Christ's  offer  of  peace  has 
been  and  always  will  be  an  apple  of  discord 
to  those  who  do  not  want  peace  at  His  pro- 
posed terms. 

And  by  the  same  token  Christ's  offer  of 
peace  cannot  be  expected  to  become  com- 
pulsorily  operative  in  the  lives  of  all  men 
at  any  particular  future  time.  His  peace 
will  become  operative  in  the  life  of  each 
man  when,  and  only  when  each  man  becomes 
ready  to  accept  the  terms  of  the  offer. 

There  is,  then,  no  discrepancy  in  the  teach- 
ings of  Jesus  concerning  the  object  of  His 
ministry.  He  came  to  offer  to  men  the 
peace  of  God,  subjectively  to  bring  to  each 
man  the  inner  quietude  of  trust  and  con- 
fidence, and  objectively  to  bring  them  all 
into  harmonious  social  relations  with  each 
other.  His  offer  is  as  available  for  this 
[146] 


ATTAINABLE  PEACE 


present  moment  as  it  can  be  for  any  ex- 
pected future  moment.  His  offer  creates 
discord  only  when  it  is  rejected.  The 
sword  will  be  sheathed  and  the  differences 
forgotten  when  the  offer  is  accepted. 

No  one  can  accuse  Jesus  of  arbitrariness 
because  the  bequest  of  His  last  will  and  tes- 
tament is  thus  seen  to  be  conditional.  Ar- 
tificial conditions  may  be  imposed  by  men 
only  in  the  bequest  of  artificial  property. 
The  testator,  for  instance,  may  impose  any 
condition  he  pleases  upon  the  bestowal  of 
his  money  and  his  real  estate.  These  are 
extraneous  things,  things  which  exist  apart 
from  the  testator's  own  personality.  But 
there  are  many  things  which  every  man  must 
bequeath  to  his  successors  without  condition. 
Something  of  his  own  disposition,  for  ex- 
ample, he  must  bequeath  to  his  children ;  cer- 
tain good  or  evil  effects  from  his  life  he 
must  leave  to  his  friends  and  acquaintances. 
And  there  are  some  things  which  every  man 
may  include  in  his  bequests  whose  ap- 
propriation is  essentially  conditioned  by 
the  very  nature  of  the  things  bequeathed. 

[147] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


Thus  real  success  may  be  bequeathed 
by  a  father  to  his  son  only  on  the  es^ 
sential  condition  of  the  son's  industry  and 
perseverance.  So  the  father's  strength  of 
character  will  become,  by  inheritance,  the 
possession  of  the  son  only  as  the  son  imi- 
tates his  father's  example  in  the  resistance 
of  temptation  and  in  the  practice  of  self- 
control.  The  successful  man  and  the  strong 
man  bequeath  to  their  children  an  incentive 
to  success  and  to  strength,  and  the  example 
of  success  and  of  strength,  but  the  bequests 
do  not  and  cannot  become  available  unless 
the  incentive  empowers  imitation. 

The  bequest  of  peace  by  Jesus  must  be 
catalogued  in  the  last  mentioned  list  of  be- 
queathable  possessions.  The  condition  of 
its  inheritance  is  contained  in  the  very  nature 
of  the  thing  bequeathed.  It  was  really  only 
the  incentive  to  peace,  and  the  pathway  to 
peace  which  Jesus  left  to  His  disciples. 
These  were  all  that  He  could  leave  them. 
The  peace  itself  could  not  become  the  full 
possession  of  anyone  of  these  disciples  ex- 
cept the  inducement  of  Jesus  should  lead 
[148] 


ATTAINABLE   PEACE 


him  to  follow  his  Master  on  the  charted  way 
to  peace. 

The  essential  condition  then  to  the  full 
possession  of  the  peace  which  was  Christ's 
last  bequest,  not  only  to  His  immediate  dis- 
ciples, but  to  all  His  followers,  is  the  Christ- 
induced  imitation  of  the  Christ  way  of  the 
attainment  of  peace.  Jesus  attained  peace 
by  the  two  pathways  of  trust  and  love.  By 
trust  in  God  He  came  into  that  peace  which 
is  the  subjective  experience  of  calmness  and 
repose.  By  love  for  His  fellow-men  He 
came  into  that  peace  which  is  the  objective 
condition  of  harmony  with  His  fellow-men. 
When  men  have  been  induced  by  Jesus,  both 
to  trust  their  God  and  to  love  their  fellows, 
they  have  come  into  the  possession  of  His 
bequest  of  peace. 

Only  one  part  of  the  peace  promised  by 
Jesus  is  subjective.  The  subjective  Chris- 
tian peace  is  the  repose  of  trust.  Some- 
times this  peace  has  been  mistaken  for  the 
rest  of  cessation  of  labour  and  of  temp- 
tation. Such  rest,  which  means  the  absence 
of  toil  and  of  conflict,  is  as  foreign  to 
[149] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


the  religion  of  Jesus  as  it  is  foreign  to 
the  idea  of  the  development  of  manhood 
and  of  womanhood.  When  one  turns  to 
the  religion  of  Jesus  for  relief  from  any  of 
the  developing  experiences  of  life,  one  will 
always  be  disappointed.  Religion  is  not  a 
substitute  for  human  development;  it  is  a 
means  to  that  development.  So  instead  of 
the  rest  of  absence  from  toil  and  conflict  we 
must  expect  the  personal  experience  of  peace 
to  give  us  something  of  more  worth,  namely, 
an  equanimity  in  toil  and  a  repose  in  con- 
flict. 

The  peace  of  Jesus  subjectively  con- 
sidered is  the  equanimity  and  the  repose 
which  enables  one  to  do  efficiently  the  work 
of  life  and  to  meet  victoriously  the  temp- 
tations of  life.  Certainly  this  peace  will 
make  the  toil  apparently  less  arduous,  and 
the  temptations  seemingly  less  strenuous. 
The  man  of  mental  equipoise  can  always  ac- 
complish a  given  task  with  much  less  effort 
than  that  needed  by  the  irritable,  impatient 
man;  and  he  who  meets  temptation  with  an 
inner  repose,  in  the  assurance  of  God-em- 
[150] 


ATTAINABLE  PEACE 


powered  victory,  must  ever,  by  this  sure 
armour  of  defence,  diminish  the  force  of  the 
temptation.  It  is  a  terrible  thing  for  any 
man  to  have  no  vv^ork  to  do  in  the  world ;  and 
no  enemy  could  wish  a  man  any  greater 
harm  than  the  removal  from  his  life  of  all 
temptation.  But  it  is  a  splendid  thing  for 
any  man  to  be  able  to  do  his  work  easily; 
and  the  best  friend  of  that  man  can  wish 
him  no  greater  blessing  than  the  power  to 
resist.  The  indwelling  peace  of  the  religion 
of  Jesus  is  the  bequest  to  every  man  from 
every  man's  best  Friend.  This  peace  creates 
the  ability  to  perform  with  comparative  ease 
the  hardest  tasks.  It  creates  the  power  to 
resist  the  severest  temptation.  Surely  no 
single  equipment  for  efficient  life  can  be 
worth  more  to  its  possessor  than  Christian 
peace  in  the  heart. 

This  helpful  equipment  for  life  is  born 
of  implicit  trust  in  God.  It  comes  to  men 
as  the  bequest  of  Jesus  because  Jesus  re- 
vealed to  men  God's  trustworthiness.  He 
who  really  like  Christ  and  through  Christ 
comes  securely  to  rely  upon  his  Father's 
[151] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


love,  comes  into  the  peace  which  enables  ef- 
ficient toil  and  which  empowers  victory,  the 
peace,  in  short,  which  energizes  and  ennobles 
hfe. 

There  is  a  certain  sense,  however,  in 
which  the  possession  of  the  inner  peace  of 
trust  is  but  a  means  to  an  end.  The  end 
towards  which  the  efficiency  of  individuals 
must  contribute  is  the  objective  peace  of 
social  harmony.  "That  all  may  be  one," 
was  the  way  Jesus  described  the  complete, 
desired  end  of  His  ministry.  Not  just  that 
some  men  might  have  the  indwelling  peace 
of  trust,  but  that  all  men  might  dwell  to- 
gether in  the  outer  peace  of  harmony. 

It  is  easy  to  misunderstand  the  nature 
of  this  outer  peace.  Social  harmony  has 
evidently  been  thought  by  some  to  be  syn- 
onymous with  the  eradication  of  all  social 
differences.  But  in  religion  and  in  society, 
as  well  as  in  music,  there  is  a  vast  difference 
between  the  meaning  of  the  words  unison 
and  harmony.  It  would  be  the  worst  im- 
aginable catastrophe  to  the  world  if  all  dif- 
ferences between  individual  tastes  and  be- 
[152] 


ATTAINABLE   PEACE 


liefs  and  practices  should  be  obliterated.  A 
unison  of  all  the  members  of  society  would 
destroy  personal  ambition  and  personal  re- 
sponsibility, and  society  thus  would  become 
not  a  living  organism,  but  an  inert,  lifeless 
instrument.  The  music  of  humanity  must 
be  played  upon  living  personalities,  not 
upon  soulless  mechanisms.  It  is  a  music 
comparable  to  the  oratorio  rendered  by  hu- 
man voices,  and  not  to  the  single  note  of 
insensate  instruments  all  attuned  to  the  same 
pitch. 

The  cause  of  the  discord,  which  is  observ- 
able in  society,  is  not  too  much  individuality, 
but  too  little  sympathy.  Each  member  or 
class  of  society  is  too  prone  to  ignore  the 
essential  relations  to  other  members  or 
classes.  Thus  industry,  which  for  its  best 
efficiency  requires  the  harmony  of  capital 
and  labour,  is  made  inefficient  by  the  jang- 
ling discord  of  each  party's  insistence 
upon  just  its  own  rights.  So  the  re- 
ligious efficiency  of  the  world  which  re- 
quires the  harmony  of  different  beliefs 
and  practices  is  made  inefficient  by  the 
[  153  ] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


discord  of  different  creeds  and  different 
rituals,  each  struggling  vociferously  to 
drown  the  sound  of  all  the  others. 

What  the  religion  of  Jesus  can  do  for 
men  is  this — not  to  make  them  all  think  and 
act  alike,  but  to  make  them  all  sympathetic 
and  tolerant.  It  can  bring  to  each  indi- 
vidual the  recognition  of  the  worth  of  all 
other  individuals.  It  can  take  away  the  dis- 
cord of  the  insistence  of  each  individual's 
necessary  note  and  bring  all  the  notes  not 
into  unison,  but  into  harmony. 

The  way  Christ's  religion  can  bring  men 
into  this  outer  peace  of  harmony  is  by  way 
of  obedience  to  His  love.  When  men  come 
really  to  love  one  another,  in  any  degree 
like  the  manner  of  His  love  for  them,  the 
difference  between  individuals  will  be  as 
marked  as  it  is  now.  The  responsibility  of 
each  individual  for  his  own  part  in  the  ora- 
torio of  humanity  will  remain  the  same. 
There  will  be  no  unison  of  voices  singing 
the  same  words  and  the  same  notes.  There 
will  be  the  different  words  and  the  different 
notes,  but  the  differences  by  the  magic  of 
[154] 


ATTAINABLE  PEACE 


directing  love  will  be  softened  into  exquis- 
ite harmony.  And  the  theme  of  the  ora- 
torio which  men  will  sing  in  one  grand 
chorus  will  be,  "Peace  on  earth,  good  will 
to  men." 


[155] 


ACHIEVING  POWER 


CHAPTER    TEN 


"Verily,  verily,  I  say  unto  you,  He  that  believeth  on  me, 
the  works  that  I  do  shall  he  do  also;  and  greater  works  than 
these  shall  he  do." — John  14  :  12. 


ACHIEVING  POWER 

In  Christ's  brief  parable  concerning  the 
merchantman  seeking  goodly  pearls,  the 
great  Teacher  does  not  sj)ecify  exactly  what 
*'the  pearl  of  great  price"  represents.  He 
has  been  generally  understood,  however,  to 
refer  to  the  inestimable  value  of  personal 
salvation.  This  somewhat  vague  and  often 
misunderstood  term  is  a  sufficient  descrip- 
tion of  the  "pearl"  only  when  we  under- 
stand by  the  term  all  that  Jesus  evidently 
meant  to  convey  by  its  use. 

Personal  salvation,  according  to  Jesus, 
is  personal  development  for  service.  It  in- 
cludes, therefore,  all  those  processes  of  ed- 
ucation and  of  discipline  and  of  exercise 
which  help  in  the  creation  of  character  and 
of  efficiency.  The  chief  value  of  personal 
salvation  thus  defined  lies  not  in  what  may 
result  to  the  saved  man  himself,  but  in  what 
through  his  salvation  must  result  to  others. 
[159] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


If  this  "jewel"  be  kept  hidden  in  its  indi- 
vidual case  it  may,  indeed,  give  a  certain 
satisfaction  to  the  owner  of  a  miserly  dis- 
position, but  the  real  value  of  the  "jewel" 
consists  in  its  power  to  beautify  and  to 
adorn.  If  the  saved  man  would  make  his 
** jewel"  really  valuable,  he  must  wear  it  con- 
tinually. He  must  use  his  "jewel"  in  such 
a  way  as  to  make  himself  more  attractive 
to  others,  more  attractive  and  so  more  win- 
some and  more  serviceable. 

In  the  discussion  of  the  values  of  the 
Christian  religion  we  have  come  at  the  very 
last  to  the  consideration  of  that  value  which 
of  them  all  is  the  most  priceless.  We  are 
to  think  now  not  of  any  personal  satisfac- 
tion which  may  and  must  come  to  him  who 
embraces  the  religion  of  Jesus,  but  of  the 
personal  power  that  must  be  his.  Health, 
forgiveness,  strength,  joy,  consolation,  and 
peace — these  are  all  pearls  of  value,  and 
it  would  be  worth  one's  while  to  try  to  be  a 
Christian  just  for  these  and  the  like  per- 
sonal satisfactions.  But  "the  pearl  of 
great  price"  is  nothing  less  than  the  personal 
[160] 


ACHIEVING   POWER 


power  of  the  Christian,  which  is  to  be  esti- 
mated not  at  all  in  terms  of  his  own  satis- 
faction, but  always  in  terms  of  his  service 
for  others. 

The  power  of  the  Christian  life  is  derived 
from  two  sources.  It  comes  in  part  from 
the  energizing  of  one's  own  resident  but 
latent  forces,  and  in  part  from  the  superhu- 
man force  which  is  the  result  of  the  union 
of  the  Christian  with  the  omnipotent  power 
of  God. 

In  the  first  place,  the  Christian  religion 
furnishes  the  dynamic  of  latent,  unused  hu- 
man forces.  Our  best  method  of  approach 
to  the  understanding  of  this  truth  is  by  way 
of  illustration. 

In  the  early  morning  after  the  terrible 
disaster  which  destroyed  so  gre^t  a  part  of 
the  city  of  San  Francisco,  a  man  was  rush- 
ing frantically  about  in  the  vicinity  of  his 
devastated  home.  He  was  searching  among 
the  debris  for  his  missing  child.  Suddenly 
he  stopped  and  put  his  hand  to  his  ear.  He 
had  heard  a  faint  cry  coming  to  him  from 
beneath  a  pile  of  torn  lumber,  overthrown 
[  161  ] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


bricks,  and  shattered  mortar.  A  moment 
later  the  man  was  feverishly  throwing  aside 
the  heavy  pieces  of  refuse,  digging  down 
in  the  direction  of  the  summoning  cry  for 
help.     Soon  he  came  to  a  heavy  beam. 

"Wait  a  minute!"  sang  out  an  approach- 
ing officer;  "You  cannot  hft  that  alone." 
But  the  man  did  not  wait.  Before  the  of- 
ficer could  reach  him  he  bent  his  puny  back 
to  the  apparently  impossible  task,  and  the 
heavy  weight  moved.  The  imprisoned  child 
crawled  out  to  safety.  And  the  man,  with 
his  dear  one  clasped  in  his  arms,  sank  do\\Ti 
upon  the  mass  of  debris  and  sobbed  his 
thanksgiving. 

But  how  could  he  move  the  weight  that 
was  apparently  too  heavy  for  the  strength 
of  two  ordinary  men?  The  evident  answer 
is  this.  The  love  of  his  child  empowered 
him. 

Consider  another  illustration.  Turn  back 
the  pages  of  the  history  of  the  American 
nation  nearly  one  hundred  and  fifty  years. 
Look  at  the  picture  of  the  distraught  colo- 
nies waiting  for  the  voice  that  should  arouse 
[  162  ] 


ACHIEVING    POWER 


them  to  united  action  in  resistance  to  the 
oppression  of  the  mother  country.  The 
first  Congress  had  already  met  and  had 
accompHshed  nothing.  Massachusetts  and 
the  other  northern  colonies  were  waiting  for 
Virginia  to  take  the  lead,  and  Virginia  was 
waiting  for  the  man  who  would  speak  the 
word  to  inspire  her  action. 

It  was  in  St.  John's  Church,  Richmond, 
at  the  meeting  of  the  new  Virginia  Conven- 
tion, that  the  word  was  spoken.  There  were 
wealthier  men  in  that  Convention  than  the 
speaker,  men  more  highly  educated  than  he, 
men  who  were  destined  to  play  a  seemingly 
more  important  part  in  the  coming  struggle 
for  independence.  But  when  Patrick 
Henry  had  finished  his  impassioned  ora- 
tion, declaring  that  "An  appeal  to  arms  and 
to  the  God  of  hosts  is  all  that  is  left  to 
us,"  a  human  voice  had  spoken  the  words 
which  touched  with  fire  the  waiting  fuse  of 
American  patriotism,  and  the  fire  did  not 
go  out  until  Cornwallis  had  surrendered  at 
Yorktown. 

But  whence  the  power  in  the  words  of  this 

[163] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


comparatively  uneducated  lawyer?  Again 
the  answer  is  evident.  He  was  empowered 
by  the  love  of  his  country. 

These  illustrations  from  the  many  that 
might  be  enumerated,  must  suffice.  They 
are  examples  of  the  power  of  a  selfless  de- 
votion to  energize  unused  and  quiescent 
forces.  Most  men  probably  never  use  more 
than  a  fraction  of  the  force  which  is  resi- 
dent in  themselves,  because  to  most  there 
never  comes  the  necessary  dynamic  to  action. 
So  an  emergency  call  always  finds  a  man 
with  more  strength  than  he  really  knew  he 
possessed.  Under  the  impetus  of  a  sudden 
and  pressing  need,  the  forces  of  the  man — 
physical,  mental,  and  moral — are  apparently 
wonderfully  multiplied.  In  reality,  his 
forces  are  not  multiplied  at  all,  but  his  un- 
used forces  are  made  operative.  He  is,  as 
we  say,  "carried  out  of  himself"  by  the  call 
of  some  one  else's  danger  or  need,  and  in 
self-forgetfulness  he  is  able  to  lift  the 
heavy  weight,  to  speak  the  inspiring  word, 
to  perform  the  needed  service.  Unselfish 
devotion  is  the  dynamic  which  can  call  into 

[164] 


ACHIEVING   POWER 


efficient  action  every  atom  of  a  man's  in- 
herent capability. 

This  is  the  dynamic  furnished  by  the  re- 
ligion of  Jesus.  The  Christian  hears  the 
words  of  his  Teacher  telHng  him  that  God 
loves  him.  He  hears  Christ  declare  that 
God  loves  all  other  men,  too.  He  hears  God 
through  Jesus,  in  accents  of  tenderest  pity, 
calling  for  the  stronger  and  more  fortunate 
of  His  children  to  help  those  who  are  weaker 
and  less  fortunate. 

Here  is  a  man  in  need.  He  is  ignorant. 
He  is  sick.  He  is  morally  incapable.  He 
is  wilfully  sinful.  He  is  exactly  like  that 
child  beneath  the  debris  of  the  San  Fran- 
cisco earthquake.  He  is  incompetent  and 
inefficient,  and  because  of  his  incompetence 
and  inefficiency,  he  is  in  imminent  danger. 
Now,  the  religion  of  Jesus  declares  that 
every  other  man  is  bound  to  this  one  man  in 
danger  by  the  ties  of  relationship  in  the 
family  of  God.  God  loves  that  man  in 
danger.  So,  too,  if  we  have  recognized  our 
relationship  to  God,  do  we  love  him.  When 
that  truth  really  grips  our  hearts,  when  we 
[165] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


come  to  know  that  it  is  our  brother  and 
God's  child  who  is  in  this  danger,  then  in 
self-forgetful  love  we  bend  our  backs  to 
the  task  of  his  salvation,  and  lo,  the  devo- 
tion of  our  love  energizes  us  and  makes  us 
efficient. 

Or  here  is  a  M^hole  class  of  people  in  need. 
This  class  is  exposed  to  disease-infected 
conditions.  This  other  class  is  the  victim  of 
the  oppression  of  iniquitous  industrial  con- 
ditions. This  third  class  is  enslaved  by 
tyrannous  political  conditions.  Christ's  re- 
ligion teaches  that  these  classes  of  people, 
like  every  individual  in  every  class,  belong  to 
the  one  family  of  God.  God  loves  these 
people,  and  by  the  same  token  He  hates  the 
untoward  conditions  which  threaten  and  op- 
press and  enslave  them.  The  love  of  God 
is  here  demanding  that  the  destructive  con- 
ditions shall  be  removed.  The  disease  germs 
must  be  annihilated.  Iniquity  in  industry 
must  be  vanquished.  Slavery  in  govern- 
ment must  be  abolished.  Our  brethren,  all 
of  them  God's  children,  are  waiting  inertly 
for  the  leader  who  shall  incite  them  to  a 
[166] 


ACHIEVING   POWER 


united  effort  for  their  own  deliverance. 
Let  a  man  really  come  to  feel  this  truth  and 
he  will  open  his  mouth  to  speak  the  protest- 
ing and  defiant  words;  and  lo,  his  selfless 
devotion  to  the  cause  of  the  oppressed  so 
empowers  his  efforts  that  he  becomes  en- 
abled to  lead  his  fellow-men  into  liberty. 
Thus  are  reformers  always  created,  and  the 
religion  of  Jesus  has  done  very  little  for  any 
man  until  it  has  made  him  a  reformer,  until 
it  has  aroused  in  his  bosom  a  Christlike  anger 
against  injustice  and  abuse,  until  it  has  en- 
gendered within  him  the  self -forgetful  cour- 
age of  the  bold  championship  of  the  cause 
of  the  oppressed. 

The  religion  of  Jesus  fires  a  man's  heart, 
stiffens  his  backbone,  strengthens  his  sinews, 
and  empowers  his  efficiency.  Such  an  one 
no  longer  stops  to  say  *'I  can't,"  but  with 
Paul  he  is  always  ready  to  declare  that 
through  the  dynamic  of  the  spirit  of  the 
loving,  serving  Christ,  "I  can." 

But  there  is  something  more  which  the  re- 
ligion of  Jesus  can  do  for  any  man.  It  can 
give  to  him  the  control  of  a  power  outside 

[167] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


himself,  a  power  which  we  can  describe  with 
no  other  word  than  that  of  superhuman. 

When  Jesus  was  preparing  His  disciples 
for  His  approaching  death,  according  to  the 
narrative  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  He  declared 
that  after  His  departure  they  would  do 
greater  things  than  He  Himself  had  accom- 
plished. We  are  not  to  understand  by  the 
"greater  works"  that  He  meant  that  His 
disciples  were  to  perform  deeds  more  mirac- 
ulous than  His  own.  The  greatness  of  even 
Christ's  works  did  not  consist  in  their  mi- 
raculousness,  but  in  their  beneficence.  His 
declaration  concerning  the  "greater  works" 
of  the  disciples  was  the  promise  of  the  en- 
largement of  His  work  to  the  accomplish- 
ment of  a  wider  beneficence.  The  disciples' 
service  for  the  world  would  be  greater  than 
His,  not  because  they  could  be  really  greater 
men  than  He  had  been,  but  because  they 
would  have  the  greater  efficiency  which  His 
greatness  had  made  possible. 

The  scientific  achievements  of  modern 
times  furnish  us  with  many  illustrative  par- 
allels to  this  spiritual  truth  spoken  by  Jesus. 
[168] 


ACHIEVING   POWER 


We  consider  only  one.  Doubtless  we  all 
should  admit  that  the  original  discoverer  of 
the  power  of  steam  must  be  ranked  as 
greater  than  all  succeeding  investigators 
in  this  line  of  physical  demonstration.  But 
just  because  of  the  revelation  of  this  first 
great  man  the  succeeding  men,  by  the  use 
of  the  revealed  power,  have  really  accom- 
plished much  greater  works.  We  cannot 
ti-uly  say  that  James  Watt  made  the  mod- 
ern, gigantic,  and  powerful  locomotive,  but 
Watt  gave  to  the  world  the  initial  revela- 
tion which  made  the  locomotive  possible. 

Now  Jesus  stands  in  the  world  of  moral 
achievement  as  does  the  discoverer  and  first 
exponent  of  physical  forces  in  the  world  of 
scientific  achievements.  Jesus  was  the  re- 
vealer  to  men  of  the  power  of  love.  He 
did  not  come  into  the  world  just  to  show 
men  what  love  could  do  for  them,  but  to 
demonstrate  to  them  what  they  could  do 
through  love.  By  His  revelation  and  ex- 
emplification He  gave  to  men  what  really 
proved  to  be  a  new  moral  and  spiritual  force. 
By  no  means  did  He  Himself  accomplish 

[169] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


the  very  last  thing  which  that  force  could 
accomplish.  He  left  to  others  to  carry  on 
His  work  of  revelation  and  exemplification 
by  new  methods  of  application.  These 
others,  through  the  new  power  which  He 
had  revealed  and  inaugurated  were,  accord- 
ing to  His  program,  to  do  even  greater 
things  than  He  had  been  able  to  accomplish 
— greater  in  extent,  not  greater  in  content, 
greater  in  the  farther  reaching  results  of  a 
continually  widening  application  of  the  new 
power. 

The  history  of  the  development  of  Christ's 
religion  is  proving  the  truth  that  Christ's 
astounding  promise  is  becoming  fulfilled. 
Compute,  if  you  will,  the  "greater  works" 
by  the  numbers  influenced.  Peter,  on  the 
day  of  Pentecost,  made  more  converts  to 
the  rehgion  of  Jesus  than  his  Master  Him- 
self had  made  during  all  the  years  of  His 
ministry.  And  to-day  there  are  preachers 
and  evangelists  who  are  influencing  more 
people  than  Peter  was  able  to  do.  The  fol- 
lowers of  Jesus,  at  the  time  of  His  death, 
numbered  at  most  but  a  few  hundred,  per- 

1 170  ] 


ACHIEVING   POWER 


haps  not  so  many  as  one  hundred.  To-day 
we  must  estimate  the  followers  of  Christ 
with  the  million  as  our  unit  of  numeration. 

Or  estimate,  if  you  choose,  the  "greater 
works"  of  the  followers  of  Christ  by  the 
geographical  extent  of  the  out-reach  of  His 
religion.  Paul  carried  the  gospel  into  re- 
gions which  Jesus  never  attempted  to  visit. 
And  the  modern  missionary  successors  of 
Paul  are  successfully  promulgating  Christ's 
religion  in  lands  wholly  unknown  to  the 
"Apostle  to  the  Gentiles."  The  provinces 
of  Judea  and  of  Galilee  were  the  scene  of 
Christ's  ministry.  The  entire  world  has  be- 
come the  scene  of  the  labours  of  His  fol- 
lowers. 

Or  value  the  "greater  works"  of  Christ's 
disciples  by  the  increasing  variety  of  the  ap- 
plications of  the  principles  which  He  incul- 
cated and  exemphfied.  Jesus  made  but 
little,  if  any,  attempt  to  apply  the  moral 
power  of  love  to  social,  industrial,  and  po- 
litical conditions.  He  was  apparently  not 
interested  in  the  subject  of  the  public  edu- 
cation of  the  youth,  nor  in  the  settlement  of 

[  IT'l  1 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


labour  disputes,  nor  in  the  establishment  of  a 
just  and  righteous  government.  Even  His 
concern  with  men's  bodies  was  limited  to  the 
cure  of  isolated  cases  of  sickness  and  did  not 
extend  to  any  attempt  to  prevent  disease. 
But  the  followers  of  Jesus  now  are  applying 
His  revealed  power  to  all  sorts  of  prob- 
lems, problems  which  Jesus  Himself  seemed 
not  to  recognize.  By  attention  to  hygiene, 
they  are  making  absolutely  impossible  some 
of  the  diseases  which  were  in  sporadic  in- 
stances only  cured  by  Jesus.  By  the 
maintenance  of  schools  and  colleges  and 
endowed  libraries,  the  modern  disciples 
of  Jesus  are  preventing  many  forms 
of  sin  which  Jesus  only  occasionally 
forgave.  By  the  introduction  of  the 
principle  of  brotherhood  into  industry 
and  into  politics,  these  later  followers  of 
Jesus  are  making  impossible  the  oppression 
of  the  poor  and  the  unfortunate,  whereas 
Jesus  Himself  was  content  with  but  one 
exhibition  of  the  holy  wrath  of  love,  when 
He  overthrew  the  tables  of  the  greedy 
grafters  in  the  temple  of  the  living  God. 
[172] 


ACHIEVING   POWER 


Jesus  rescued  an  occasional  individual  from 
some  of  the  effects  of  ignorance  and  disease 
and  sin.  The  followers  of  Jesus  are  keep- 
ing whole  classes,  whole  nations,  one  might 
almost  say  the  whole  world  from  ignorance 
and  from  disease,  from  crime  and  from  sin- 
fulness. 

If  some  of  these  "greater  works,"  per- 
haps all  of  them,  are  being  accomplished  to- 
day by  scientific  methods  which  are  compre- 
hensible to  the  human  intellect,  their  great- 
ness is  not  thereby  diminished  one  whit.  To 
help  any  man  in  any  of  his  actual  needs  is 
great  work,  however  that  help  may  be  ac- 
complished. The  "greater  works'*  prom- 
ised by  Jesus  are  the  applications  of  His  re- 
vealed moral  power  of  love  to  more  people, 
to  a  wider  field,  and  to  a  greater  variety  of 
activities.  The  "greater  works"  are  pos- 
sible because  of  the  greatness  of  Christ's  in- 
itial revelation.  That  the  work,  in  its  ex- 
tent, must  be  greater  than  Christ's,  is  inevi- 
table because  the  power  which  He  revealed 
was  a  living,  divine  power,  and  therefore  its 
fruits  must  grow. 

[  173  ] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


We  must  not  hesitate  in  our  description 
of  this  power,  revealed  in  its  fullness  by 
Jesus  and  by  Him  made  available  to  men. 
It  is  a  superhuman  power.  By  this  we  can- 
not mean  that  it  is  a  miraculous  power,  nor 
even  a  supernatural  power.  But  it  is  super- 
human. It  is  a  power  outside  and  above 
the  man  himself,  a  power  greater  than  any 
potency  which  can  be  energized  into  his  own 
latent  capabilities. 

We  have  reached  the  limit  of  man's  unas- 
sisted power,  however  disinterested  may  be 
his  energizing  motive,  long  before  we  have 
reached  the  end  of  his  possible  achievements. 
A  man  under  the  stress  of  an  imperative 
call  of  love  may  lift  a  much  greater  weight 
than  he  could  possibly  lift  without  that  em- 
powering incentive.  But,  after  all,  he  can 
lift  much  more  by  the  intelligent  use  of  the 
steam  derrick.  When  he  uses  the  steam 
derrick,  he  is  utilizing  a  power  of  God  which 
is  superhuman.  That  a  man  who  is  en- 
dowed with  the  spirit  of  Jesus  should  be 
able  to  accomplish  results  utterly  impossible 
to  him  without  Christ's  spirit,  is  no  more 

[174] 


ACHIEVING    POWER 


miraculous  or  supernatural  than  that  a  man, 
by  the  use  of  the  steam  derrick,  can  utilize 
a  power  superhuman.  We  must  consider 
the  spiritual  power  of  divine  love  in  the 
world  to  be  as  natural  as  the  physical 
power  of  what  we  call  natural  forces. 
And  we  must  note  that  the  great  results 
which  have  been  accomplished  by  men 
inspired  by  love  are  explicable  only  on 
the  assumption  that  they  have  been  using 
love's  steam  derrick.  Their  selfless  devotion 
has  enabled  them  to  use  a  power  divine. 
The  power  of  their  human  endeavour  has 
been  multiplied  by  the  power  of  God's  om- 
nipotence, and  lo!  the  "greater  works"  have 
been  accomplished. 

Now  if  this  omnipotent,  divine  power  of 
the  love  of  God,  like  all  other  powers  of 
God,  be  a  real  and  a  natural  power,  it  must 
be  reducible  to  certain  definite  and  com- 
prehensible laws.  There  must  be  a  way  by 
which  any  man  can  avail  himself  of  this 
superhuman  power  just  as  there  is  a  way 
by  which  he  can  avail  himself  of  the  super- 
human power  of  steam  or  of  electricity. 
[175] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


The  way  marked  out  by  Jesus  is  the  way 
of  fellowship  with  His  ideals.  He  Himself 
was  the  Way,  He  declared  on  one  occasion 
— the  Way  and  the  Truth  and  the  Life. 
By  this  we  must  understand  Him  to  mean 
that  anyone  who  would  accept  His  truth 
and  live  His  life  must,  by  that  way,  come 
into  possession  of  His  power. 

To  be  more  explicit,  to  accept  the  truth 
in  Christ  is  to  accept  not  merely  in  an  in- 
tellectual sense,  but  in  an  ethical  sense  the 
truth  of  the  Fatherhood  of  God,  with  all 
its  implications  of  the  brotherhood  of  men, 
and  of  love's  compulsion  to  service.  To 
live  Christ's  life  means  the  attempt  to  serve 
and  to  save  one's  fellow-men  by  self-f orget- 
fulness  and  sacrifice.  Given  a  man  who 
will  really  take  this  truth  of  Christ  into  his 
life  and  try  to  live  it,  and  you  have  a  man 
who  can  no  more  avoid  utilizing  the  super- 
human, divine  power  of  love,  than  the  man 
who  has  come  into  practical  possession  of 
the  truths  of  physics  can  avoid  utilizing 
superhuman  and  also  divine  power  when  he 

[  176  ] 


ACHIEVING    POWER 


controls  a  steam  derrick  or  when  he  touches 
the  electric  button. 

That  superhuman  physical  power  can  be 
used  by  man  is  a  matter  of  fact  which  we 
observe  every  day  in  our  lives.  That  super- 
human spiritual  power  can  be  used  by  man 
is  not  merely  a  truth  to  be  logically  deduced ; 
this  also  is  a  matter  of  fact.  That  all  men 
may,  if  they  will,  use  the  power  which  some 
men  are  manifestly  using,  is  a  truth  which 
cannot  be  denied  except  by  the  denial  of 
the  unity  of  God  and  of  the  inviolability  of 
God's  law. 

Achieving  power!  This  is  the  promise 
of  the  Christian  religion.  And  this  is  the 
end  of  the  Christian  religion,  of  which  the 
consciousness  of  filial  relation  with  God  is 
only  the  beginning. 

The  way  of  progress  in  Christ's  religion 
is  the  way  of  faith  in  God  and  love  for 
men.  All  along  the  way  there  will  be 
brought  to  the  traveler  the  blessings  of  for- 
giveness and  of  health,  of  consolation  and 
of  strength,  of  joy  and  of  peace. 

[  177  ] 


EFFICIENT  RELIGION 


But  no  Christian  can  be  content  with  any 
of  these  blessings  which  may  come  just  to 
himself.  The  Christian  has  not  come  into 
possession  of  the  great  blessing  promised 
by  Christ's  religion,  the  "pearl"  of  price- 
less value,  until  in  the  selfless  devotion  of 
his  life  his  whole  being  becomes  energized, 
until  by  the  inevitableness  of  the  operation 
of  the  laws  of  love  he  makes  use  of  the 
very  omnipotence  of  love  for  the  accom- 
plishment of  superhuman  achievements,  un- 
til he  says,  "In  Christ's  strengthening  power 
I  can,"  and  until  bj^  the  use  of  that  power 
he  achieves. 


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